aairey
No issues running it in Flatpak so far for light gaming.
I read this as:
Looking for a Half-Life Linux distro
Yes, I do this with Ansible :).
There are Flatpak modules and gsettings modules to set up Gnome to your liking.
I also build my own toolbox using ansible-container.
Yes.
First you will need to get the VPN up (or be in the office, in the same network to be able to join the AD domain.
Then you need to join the AD domain using realmd. This will join the computer to the AD domain like any regular windows PC. It will set up the Kerberos client, DNS and everything for you (this part is done in sssd).
Once joined you should be able to access the network shares with SMB.
RedHat and deriviates have good support for this. So I would recommend Fedora Workstation, CentOS Stream or RHEL Desktop to set this up in.