Oh and pangolin for a VPN tunneling replacement.

Proxmox communities are also good for some ideas, basically every sysadmin I know eventually spins up a cluster and builds their ideal tech stack that they wished they could use at work.

You should stick with more “corporate” or adjacent distros, that way they (or you) can purchase a support contract without having to reinstall or shift later down the line, so more like fedora or opensuse.

Postgress is more mainstream than SQL server in cloud native environments, no licensing. And plenty of managed option without too much of a lift and shift.

Next cloud might be an option to replace office 365, should look at open/only office (forget which one is active) along side libre office.

I think jitski can help replace zoom/teams, kind if.

Biggest hurdle will be excel and Active Directory Nothing else comes close to as feature (and hair pulling bug) filled as excel.

For AD there’s not even really an equivalent, but that can be a good thing. I would look into combining an Oauth service (keycloak is suppose to be good for “consumer” grade, Okta or whatever preferred cloud provide has for more professional) along with something like a casbin library (at least for servers/development).

I highly recommend following all the self hosted and open source communities here on Lemmy, I find new tech at least once a week from them that I consider taking to my bosses.

If possible it might help to have a couple demo PCs out so that they and try different desktop environments. Some might be more enthusiastic if they can not only play around with it when it’s up and running (and gives people something to do while your helping others) but also if the DE matches their “workflow better” it also gives you a chance to show them how to do common tasks. Maybe different demos have different “suites”, like here’s the gaming demo, here’s regular, productivity, etc

I agree with some of the other posts, I’d stick with 1 distro (whichever all the helpers are most comfortable with) so that you can speak confidently about it, and decrease the chances of something going wrong and you having to break out Google and the terminal. A DE is an easier choice to explain that different distros affecting and impacting things they can’t see. Especially if you might have to provide tech support during the beginning. Maybe just say a throw away line or 2 about there being different distros, just like there’s different kinds of cheese. Still same thing at its core, just different options.

I also recommend a couple spare external hard drives for them to back up their files.

I’d maybe do just a brief overview at the beginning. And go more in depth afterwards so they don’t get overloaded.