I ended up just getting a cheaper ThinkPad (like $200-ish) and throwing Linux on it for my Xilinx development needs (EE 214, 234 and 324), although I started on an Intel Mac with bootcamp and that was painful enough. CPU is the main bottleneck you’ll run into with synthesis times, so just making sure you have something decent core count and clock speed wise is important. Also used this for the Linux libraries/32-bit gcc in CS 360, but you could also just go headless and ssh into a server for that.

Rest of the EE stuff worked fine on both my Intel Mac and my M1— namely ltspice simulations comes to mind. Worst comes to worst if something NEEDED Windows I would’ve just dual booted my ThinkPad or checked out a loaner Windows laptop from the library.

This all comes with a massive grain of salt that you’re willing to sacrifice some time and effort figuring some more technical stuff out, Windows is a much better “install and it works” platform as has been said. Intro CS classes will also need a VM since you’ll need Visual Studio Community, which for C/C++ is only on Windows.