It all depends if you want to focus on learning or on fixing technical things.
If your school teaches on photoshop, expects you to provide .psd files, etc. And you decide to use gimp, krita or whatever you'll spend most of your time learning gimp/krita,... and solving the compatibilités issue while saving/converting the files rather than actually doing your homework and when you'll get problems your friends / teacher won't be able to assist you.
If your school has a network but they only support windows / macOS or only provide .deb or .rpm (for their VPN or so), you might have to struggle to configure the network connection on your laptop.
But usually laptop @ school are mainly used for note taking, for searching info on the web, for sharing files with teachers and other students and unless there are specific software requirements, you are free to use whatever you want to do your work.
So just get to know your school and it's expectations and you will have the answer to your question.