System requirements for laptop
Hello, I’m sw engineer working with ROS system. I want to buy my personal laptop for study but I’m not sure I really need discrete graphics card. I will use rviz and simulation stuffs sometimes but not usually I think because I will use laptop only for study outside or coding mainly. In my case, should I buy workstation laptop with discrete graphics card or just lightweight i7 cpu laptop is enough? i7 laptop with integrated graphics card laptop works well with VM?
Since there is no absolut answer to your question, I tell you, what I personally experienced. With a laptop with Intel® Core™ i7-8565U processor, 16 GB ram ( 2x SO-DIMM DDR4 PC2400), plain xubuntu 20.04 installed (no virtual machines), NVIDIA graphic card: ROS2 runs smoothly, RViz works great. The problems starts when using Gazebo. For this reason, I prefer to run Gazebo in a separate PC in the same network and the ROS stuff on my laptop. Over the network works everything great
I would definitely recommend a dedicated graphics card for Gazebo. However, I would like to point out that Gazebo does not run well in a VM. Some claim that it's not too bad, but it's simply not great.
I'd recommend making a dual boot out of your new laptop. Most have at least 500GB of space and dedicating 50GB for Ubuntu shouldn't be a problem and should be more than enough.