What kind of software are developers building and do they have automation/CI for this? In my company we are mostly deploying web apps to Linux with devs using all of these laptops. If you have a wide range of development going on, then I'd suggest prioritizing the feasible ones.
Using https://github.com/bradwilson/ansible-dev-pc (public equivalent to ours), you can automate the setup of a Linux laptop or WSL2 environment under Windows. This covers a fair chunk of our dev team. Once you start thinking about making this work on macOS, it starts becoming quite a bit more work, but it's not terrible if management values the effort.
If you have people doing mobile and Windows desktop development in addition to Linux web apps, it starts to get much more complex. Maybe you can't offer a fully "pre-installed" laptop, but you can automate the time-consuming parts like a Visual Studio install.
From experience, you are going to encounter a lot of developers who struggle more than you expect with troubleshooting and automation of their work. This includes experienced devs. It seems to turn on interest and curiosity versus dev experience. It helps to create a checkpoint at onboarding where you make an effort to determine the best approach for them and know who accepts an automated happy path provided by you and who wants to handle things on their own (and perhaps fails). You can then report on the general pattern of issues to management and prioritize ways of improving your happy path build so they don't reject it.
Using https://github.com/bradwilson/ansible-dev-pc (public equivalent to ours), you can automate the setup of a Linux laptop or WSL2 environment under Windows. This covers a fair chunk of our dev team. Once you start thinking about making this work on macOS, it starts becoming quite a bit more work, but it's not terrible if management values the effort.
If you have people doing mobile and Windows desktop development in addition to Linux web apps, it starts to get much more complex. Maybe you can't offer a fully "pre-installed" laptop, but you can automate the time-consuming parts like a Visual Studio install.
From experience, you are going to encounter a lot of developers who struggle more than you expect with troubleshooting and automation of their work. This includes experienced devs. It seems to turn on interest and curiosity versus dev experience. It helps to create a checkpoint at onboarding where you make an effort to determine the best approach for them and know who accepts an automated happy path provided by you and who wants to handle things on their own (and perhaps fails). You can then report on the general pattern of issues to management and prioritize ways of improving your happy path build so they don't reject it.