The worst laptop you can find could probably be better than even a reasonably specced VPS. Low end VPS are dire, and you can get some pretty decent laptops for almost nothing. If it’s pre 8th Gen. Intel they’re basically worthless on the used market. But they’ll still easily get the job done.
If you’ve got a thunderbolt port on your laptop and a thunderbolt dock on your laptop then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work.
I’m not familiar with thunderbolt on linux, but on windows you plug it in and it just works™️ and shows up as if it was inside your machine. Your DE on linux might automatically do it, but if you’re command line only you’ll probably have to run a command first.