Hi everyone,
I tried going for the CPTS some months ago, after completing the course and having done some boxes, I felt ready, on my first try, like apparently a lot of people I stayed stuck on the 8th flag. 2nd try though, it went really well and I managed to get to 11 flags in 5-6 days.
But then, I couldn't progress more, I stayed stuck at this point, I re read the course, I looked everywhere on every host I had control upon, the network shares, I didn't find credentials that could help me nor could I find exploits to get through.
On the last days I concentrated on the report and thought, at worst the review will help me pinpoint what I was missing, all I got was "You should read the course again" and it felt a lot like a "git gud m8". And so I ended up discovering a htb community here and thought that I couldn't hurt to try and talk with other people that may have attempted the CPTS and maybe got stuck at the same point I was. So, yeah, conv's open I guess!
Personnaly CachyOS has been the one to stop my distro hopping, though I must say, I 'm an arch linux fan, so Cachy did it for me. All of the Fedora based distros I've tried were good at the beginning but felt limited at some point, though this is specific to my use cases. But one that I really liked, and I'm not much of a debian person usually was PikaOS, so I'd recommend trying it out if not already done.