Having the whole repository on your laptop is fine if it’s a gigabyte. If it’s a terabyte, not so much.

The issue isn’t really disk space. Disk space is as cheap as it’s ever been and still getting cheaper. The problem is network speed. If the initial clone involves moving 1 TB onto your desktop machine, it’s gonna take a while.

The current best practice with a DVCS is to break things up into smaller repositories. If you have a single repository that is more than a terabyte in size and absolutely cannot be broken up into smaller ones, then you have many, many problems. One of those problems is that it will not be feasible for you to use a DVCS.