If you want something useful, maybe some more info on what you use your computer for? Advice for a glorified web terminal would be "Click the Firefox icon". Advice for learning bash would be a massive rabbithole.
App suggestions are also very dependent on what you use your computer for.
Initially, I heard about Bazzite OS here on Lemmy; I was tempted to try it out. As someone who loves FOSS, I always wanted to move to Linux. However, I do gaming occasionally, holding me back until I discovered Bazzite OS.
Work: I need to learn Linux to be a penetration tester.
Customisation: I Love customisation, only Windows (I still have it installed on my other drive; it’s fully customised with zero bloatware). Currently following this tutorial to customise my OS. However, I can’t find anything similar to Latte-Dock. I have tried Plank and Cairo Dock. They’re buggy.
Apps: I’m looking for alternatives to ShareX, Fan controller, Flow launcher any other helpful tool similar to them. I have been exploring for the last 2/3 days, but I couldn’t find any app that comes even closer to ShareX (I mainly use video recording, OCR, Image capture and GIF maker features), I’m currently trying FlameShot.
Cooler control is great if you need to control the pump and fans of a CPU cooler. I’m not sure if it can do case fans like fan control but I just set them in the bios anyways.
So on the gaming front, pretty much any mainstream Linux distro would work for that. Proton is pretty damn stable and great on any distro that supports Steam. If you like Bazzite though, you do you.
For pen testing, must-have skills are nmap, bash, sqlmap, wireshark and the burp suite. If you know how to use all those, you've got basic coverage of most common attack vectors (password cracking is also covered by bash, there's 101 different password cracking algorithms in various CLI spps).
I'm a lazy ass who doesn't care much about customization, hopefully someone else can help you with that :))
Might take some effort and learning bash and WINE + winetricks to get that running, but hey, you're gonna need to do that anyways for the pentest stuff :)
Bazzite is great but gaming is also great on any distro.
Alternatively there are lots of gaming focused distros. Garuda, Chimera, Nobara, etc.
The difference between them will mostly be the "out of box experience", what software comes pre-installed, and what package manager is used.
I recommended Debian or Ubuntu based distros if you plan to use anything else, as if the dev releases software outside of Flatpak, it's usually a .deb file.
Why do you need something similar to Latte Dock? Why can't you just use Latte dock?
Apps: I’m looking for alternatives to ShareX, Fan controller, Flow launcher any other helpful tool similar to them.
FlameShot is a great alternative for ShareX, I don't really know about Fan controller, but KDE has a built-in replacement for Flow launcher called KRunner. By default, you should be able to launch it with Alt + Space. If not, check the Keyboard shortcut page in the system settings.
I also the normal Plasma panel, don't have any issues with it. They added quite a few Latte Dock features to the normal panel. Your desktop looks great btw!
I feel like third-party docks are not correctly implemented. A plasma panel is what you should be using. Thanks (: That was my first-ever try, by the way. I can’t make the background transparent despite selecting the transparent option.
Use the website alternativeto.com to locate Linux versions of windows or Mac programs. Also if you find something on Linux but its not quite right, can find listed similar apps.
It has quite extensive coverage of GUI apps. Less so CLI. Certain niche areas are more comprehensive than others.
Work: I need to learn Linux to be a penetration tester.
First, learn nmap. That'll get you 80% of the way.
Also Google "Linux server hardening", read through some tutorials and understand why each step is important and what it protects against.