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You should be able to run Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04, on your laptop without much problem, you can find the certification details here with the hardware details.

VMWare or VirtualBox should work fine, although I've had to a VMWare extension/plugin (sorry, I forget the details) to map a USB connected arm into the virtual machine. I used the typical VMWare setup for everything else, just bump up RAM and storage as you would with any other VM. I also set up a bridged network connection so ROS could talk to other things on the network. Most of my work is in ROS 2, but never had problems working across a flat network.

If you're doing development with an Ubuntu desktop, I'd also suggest taking a look at using LXD containers instead of a full VM. Pretty easy learning curve, take a look at ROS Development with LXD for starters. Mapping the device into the container's pretty straight forward, and I've found it much easier to quickly duplicate or spin up new environments, swap between ROS 1 and ROS 2, etc., etc.