Debian minimal netinstall should fit you use case. Long support time, small footprint and should support everything you want to do. Just secure it by having a unprivileged account doing all the stuff you want to do.

With that amount of ram you could make it a hypervisor and host a lot of containers and vms. Maybe proxmox would be a good fit?

Wow thanks. Was missing that for a long time.

Firefox would give me weird problems with teams in the past. Have not tried it in a while though. I’ll try it and if it works without problems now I’m happy to leave chromium behind.

For teams specifically I’m just using the web version with chromium. Installed as a chromium app so I have quick access to it and have it on my taskbar. Rest of Office 365 works just fine in any browser. (Outlook, SharePoint, Power apps etc) For OneDrive Sync you can use https://abraunegg.github.io/ which should work on most distros.

Since you using the software documentation and creating issues you find would be a good start. Also as a sysadmin you might be familiar with integration of applications into other software which could be useful as a guide for other users. Especially scripting automation for your spefic deployment.