xxJohneyxx11 you can absolutely test Flarum or develop extensions on a macbook air with a setup like MAMP. As long as you can get a PHP development setup that meets our system requirements, you can use pretty much any computer with any operating system.
Some people have hosted forums on Raspberry Pis but I wouldn't recommend hosting on such a small computer or laptop unless it's some sort of internal project. Best to use a trusted shared or VPS hosting in the cloud for production hosting.
