I have tried out Gnome, KDE, Lxqt and Xfce on a regular desktop and all of them feel nice. I haven’t tried many DE’s on a laptop.
Are there any particular DE’s you like on a laptop, because of things like power consumption and efficiency that would not come normally into consideration for a desktop?
I have not used a desktop environment on a laptop in a very long time. For a long while, I had fluxbox installed and that was good enough. Nowadays, my laptop almost exclusively runs EXWM. I can’t really recommend that for general use though.
If I were to install a full DE now, I think I would go for LXQT. I love Openbox, and I would probably end up replacing the panel with tint2. That would be a decent environment, I think.