Under no circumstances use <code>.local</code> TLD, even for airgapped networks. It will ruin your day with desktop Linuxen (and probably Macs). This is a reserved TLD for mDNS/Avahi and its presence in “regular” DNS service interferes, for example, with service discovery.
If your Win admin rolled LOCAL ActiveDirectory domain company-wide years ago - you are basically screwed.
Ask me how I know.
UPDATE: This is mandated by <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6762" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">RFC 6762</a> (emphasis mine):
<blockquote>
[…]
This document specifies that the DNS top-level domain “.local.” is a
special domain with special semantics, namely that any fully
qualified name ending in “.local.” is link-local, and names within
this domain are meaningful only on the link where they originate.
This is analogous to IPv4 addresses in the 169.254/16 prefix or IPv6
addresses in the FE80::/10 prefix, which are link-local and
meaningful only on the link where they originate.
Any DNS query for a name ending with “.local.” MUST be sent to the
mDNS IPv4 link-local multicast address 224.0.0.251 (or its IPv6
equivalent FF02::FB). The design rationale for using a fixed
multicast address instead of selecting from a range of multicast
addresses using a hash function is discussed in Appendix B.
Implementers MAY choose to look up such names concurrently via other
mechanisms (e.g., Unicast DNS) and coalesce the results in some
fashion. Implementers choosing to do this should be aware of the
potential for user confusion when a given name can produce different
results depending on external network conditions (such as, but not
limited to, which name lookup mechanism responds faster).
</blockquote>

Paweł Kraszewski

The .local top-level domain is reserved for mDNS/Avahi and should never be used in regular DNS configurations, even for isolated networks. RFC 6762 mandates that .local queries must be sent to multicast addresses, causing conflicts with traditional DNS services and breaking service discovery on Linux and macOS systems. Organizations using .local in Active Directory face significant compatibility issues.

Don't ever use .local TLD

I ran into this on a small-scale local network one time and it was a pain.

I’ve set up a short domain just for myself. Since I haven’t even configured an A record, I’m completely free from this kind of trouble. The only issue is the SSL certificate.

Thanks for the thought. Sadly that is what I inherited in our network for AD sadly. However, no issues with bonjour air print. Most have been able to discover and print with no issues but good to know in case it breaks later down the road.

Never had any problems with .local domains. I even use them over mesh VPN (Tailscale) just fine, but I hardcoded all the local DNS servers (1 per domain) IP addresses.

So what do you use on your home network, for a homelab let’s say?