Good luck

This is wonderful news

That’s awful. That’s why I’m not a member or donor. They are just using the name to make money.

Debian would be the most obvious choice. Perhaps Alma is also a good option. If you would like a european option, OpenSUSE leap can also do the job.

Tailscale or Netbird, any of them is better than setting up DDNS and securing the network access yourself.

KDE is awesome. Congrats to all people involved with it.

A Matrix server is a good solution. You can disable federation if you would rather not talk to other instances and have a similar experience to Mattermost, Slack, etc.

If you dislike the Matrix protocol, an XMPP server would work exactly the same way.

NextCloud Chat could also be a viable solution for internal chat.