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 recently switched to xfce.
I used KDE exclusively since 2004. That’s a very long time but KDE Plasma in combination with nvidia got worse, what felt like, every single day over the last years, so it finally came to the point where I had no choice to look for something that works better.
Super happy with xfce after I set it up almost exactly like my KDE setup. Sure there are some thing that are not as “well rounded” than some of the excellent Plasma features but over all it works great!
xfce is the least buggy de I ever used, never seen anything not work as intended on it even on very low en hardware
That was the main reason I choose it over the others. Having a stable DE that doesn’t change much which works great with nvidia and xorg.