Give it a shot; I think you'll be pleasantly surprised! The key is to be practical and lean into making it easy instead of trying to go for the linux martyr merit badge. Your two issues you mention are hardware (driver issues) and software (excel, etc)

The best way to deal with driver issues is to avoid them entirely. This means

(1) pick the easiest distro. Any distro can work, but it's a matter of how much work you need to put in. You want to put in none, so ignore any distro fans and nerds who promote the flavor of the week and any other preferences of your own and just use Ubuntu. Debian Sid is also a good choice but not quite as easy as Ubuntu. I don't recommend Red Hat on the desktop (I'm hypocritically typing this from my Fedora laptop because I ignored my own advice...) but if you can't help yourself, at least use Fedora, NEVER an LTS distro like CentOS. LTS is great on the server but means outdated or missing drivers on the desktop. (To be honest Fedora is fine but Ubuntu is a bit more popular and you'll run into software packaged as .deb but not as .rpm, and blog posts assuming debian/ubuntu and not an rpm based distro when searching for desktop related stuff these days. Maddening for a RH fan, but best to just take the easy path here.)

(2) Buy the laptop for the linux, not the other way around. Might be too late in your case I guess, but check out https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn (this will apply to Ubuntu, which is based closely on Debian, and to a lesser degree, any linux distro) or some other page appropriate to your chosen distro. You can easily figure out how compatible the hardware is ahead of time this way. Desktop linux works GREAT on a laptop or desktop build that you choose already knowing you want to put desktop linux on it at purchase time. It's only when you force it to work with whatever you happen to already have lying around that you're rolling the dice.

The best way to deal with software issues.... is also to just avoid them. Use Codeweavers CrossOver Office or whatever it's called these days so you can just keep using Excel. No need to waste time converting to OpenOffice or anything silly like that. You run a business so the tiny license fee is well worth it. Try a VM for stuff that doesn't work well in CrossOver.

In summary the key is to not reinvent the wheel. Follow the well trodden paths of a very popular distro on very popular well tested hardware using the same windows software you already use but emulated/virtualized, and you'll have a fantastic time. And as soon as something starts acting funny you'll get a real kick out of being able to apply your existing linux admin skills, run iostat, strace, ps, look at /proc, take LVM snapshots, all that sort of thing, in a desktop setting. And frankly, as long as you stick to this easy path, you will wonder why anyone complains about desktop linux being painful at all. If however, you decide to use some random cool distro and switch to some random cool open source alternative software and try to make it work with whatever random hardware you already have lying around.... you might get lucky, or you might get the infamous linux desktop experience of spending all weekend screwing around to try to barely make things work, and then you'll end up writing another blog post about why desktop linux still isn't ready.