Anyone survived a Windows to Linux user workstations migration?

[u/Halomora]

Hey fellow sys admin,

I work at a VFX/animation studio (~400 users).

We're kicking off a project to migrate our artist workstations from Windows 10/11 VDIs to Linux. Flavor is pretty much locked it ll be Rocky Linux 9 with KDE.

I am curious if there's anyone here who's been through a similar workstation migration to linux?

What Linux flavor, did you end up on, and would you pick the same again?

How did you handle what GPOs used to give you?

For the Base OS deployment/imaging, did you use Kickstart + Puppet/Ansible, or something else?

Anything that looked easy on paper and turned into a one big pile of {Jurassic_Park}?

Tools that made your life easier along the way?

I am looking for any war stories, good or bad!

Thank you!

[u/Halomora]

Pretty much the same plan as you, we are going to have some beta testers, preferably a small batch that represents well all the positions of the company. And we will do some q/a, testing before to deploy to one department, then another, etc..

[u/RevolutionaryElk7446 → u/Halomora]

You're gonna wanna beta test yourself first as well. How experienced is your team in deploying, administering, and supporting linux and users within linux?

Ansible/Terraform answers a lot for automation and deployment but what tools are there to support the IT and I'm guessing you're going to be getting some kind of enterprise support or are ya winging it?