Thanks for advising on best Linux flavour to use as Development Platform on a laptop.
From your question I cannot see any constraints imposed by your development environment, nor any indication of your deployment intentions: both these might affect what is an appropriate development environment.
It helps if you have some familiarity with a particular Linux distribution. I tend to favour Centos for my production environment, though I tend to develop in Mac OSX or in Windows simply because I have better access to a range of other software alongside my Servoy development, without having to switch machines. That said I tend to use Parallels to keep my Servoy development in a virtual machine that I use for nothing other than Servoy development.