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?
On my laptops I like the same one as on my desktops: KDE Plasma. With any other I quickly start missing the features that KDE Plasma offers and the configurability and customizability. And It is also quite lightweight for all that it offers. Others often offer much less and consume more resources then KDE Plasma.
Yeah, KDE Plasma is surprisingly light on resources. I’m flexible and can make almost any desktop environment work for me, maybe because I started back in the day with TWM and FVWM on HPUX. However, given the choice I run Plasma with the Latte dock, I got it setup to look like a macOS/Unity mix on my Laptop.
I recently got it going with Wayland, even though I’m using a NVidia gfx card in Dedicated mode, and it’s just amazingly smooth and free of several X11 old annoyances. Gaming through Proton/XWayland works well too.