
Put another way, the light setup provides the live desktop with Xfce, Firefox, and the core tools needed to access the network and data stored there. The large variant includes everything in the standard setup, and adds a lot of additional tools ( kali-linux-large).
a light selection ( kali-linux-light) - this pulls in the core tools, and only adds Firefox. the core Linux tools ( kali-linux-core, indirectly). the default Kali selection ( kali-linux-default): most of the analysis tools you’d expect in a standard Kali installation.
the core Linux tools ( kali-linux-core): tools to access remote file systems (NFS, Samba, etc.), partition management, archivers, wireless access, OpenVPN, the OpenSSH server, Vim. The “standard” (GNOME) Kali setup includes: I’ll list the differences below look up the referenced metapackages in the previous link to get the full details. The different releases offer different default selections of packages, using metapackages.