Basically you just need a distro that provides a working Qt4 install, including development headers, etc. Debian 9 and 10 have both been confirmed to work, as has CentOS 7. Someone said the newer versions of Ubuntu (20.x) only have Qt5, so you have to jump through extra hoops to get Qt4 installed. I'm thinking 18.4 LTS would probably work out of the box though, but I haven't tested it.

The Qt detection is a little kludgy, so there can sometimes be problems if you have both Qt3 and Qt4 on the same system - sometimes the configure script seems to find/use the wrong one, and you have to override it by specifying the QTDIR environment variable. I've tried to fix it up as problems have been reported, but I'm pretty sure there are still some issues. So whether to use a different laptop or not is up to you - a different one with no Qt3 cruft should mean less chance of issues, but also means the hassle of setting up another box, etc. Whatever route you choose, if you run into problems, report them here and I'll do what I can to help.

CentOS typically uses dnf rather than apt, so if you go that route the commands will be a bit different than what you listed. I'm not a regular CentOS user (the first time I ever used it was to troubleshoot a problem reported here), so I'm not 100% certain on the commands but I think it should be something like

Code:
dnf group install "Development Tools"
dnf install  qt-devel libpcap-devel
If you find different/additional steps are needed, please contribute your findings to the "Distro Compatibility" thread that's stickied in the beta forum. My plan is to eventually incorporate all of that info into the documentation.