I started with Hassio about two or three months ago on a Raspberry 3. The enormous time needed for restarts after any smallest GUI change (pre Lovelace) drove me crazy. When RPi crashed and my precious config was gone, so was my patience. Since then HA has been running on my ancient former work machine, Lenovo T42, C2D, 4 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD. Battery is almost dead, but who cares.
There’s Ubuntu server 18.04 running with 12 docker containers:
Home Assistant (not Hassio)
HA Configurator
Influx
Grafana
Node-Red
Mosquitto
Booksonic
Cops
Heimdall
Watchtower
Calibre-server
ESPHome
Tasmota
The system has been online with no restarts since then, disk usage is 23 %, memory usage is 43 % and CPU is about 4 % on average. I’m very happy with it.
Should you consider upgrading your laptop? Not really. Just for noise reduction from the HDD, I’d go for a SSD drive, even a refurbished 128 GB or maybe 256 GB could come in handy.
You can keep Ubuntu Mate there, no need for the server edition, especially if you are not really into Linux (I am). Mate is a well balanced DE with very low system resources.