I think the main thing to keep in mind when doing any of these hacking games is permission. Do you have permission to do what you are doing? With overthewire they give you permission to do the challenges. If you were to try to go outside of what they say you can do, and try to pivot to another part of their system to hack, that’d be illegal.
If you’re interested beyond cli stuff like otw/bandit has check out tryhackme.com They have a lot of fun beginner friendly stuff as well.










Still on Mint. Tried catchy recently when I nuked my Mint install. (I told myself I’d never remember to remove kisak-mesa before updating the kernal, and yup).
Was only on catchy for half a day, but did really like it. KDE and some of the preinstalled tools were nicer than Mint. Only issue is I could only access my old NTFS windows drives as read only. In the process of getting more storage so I can backup and format everything as ext4, and might try catchy again. But Mint has been treating me well, and has no issues handling the windows drives.