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 went with i3 (i3wm) instead of a full DE on my debian laptop. I wanted to minimize trackpad use without requiring peripherals (like a mouse).
On one hand it’s highly performant and easily configurable; on the other hand, it does lead to problems that I wouldn’t have known about with a DE—for example, I had screen tearing for months until I learned I needed a compositor, which doesn’t come included.
In other words: it is a very barebones OOBE, and requires a lot of setup and RTFM (it’s probably in the user guide that i need a compositor), but the reward of higher performance/lower power draw, easily configuring the hell out of it, smoothly navigating everywhere with the keyboard alone, and reclaiming screenspace from taskbars and titlebars has made it my preferred setup (even on desktop).
Tangential to the question, but my “no mouse” ethic has taken considerable effort to learn the cli way of dealing with configuration that is trivialized by GUIs (e.g. volume and wifi, i’m still struggling with bluetooth and rtorrent), but it’s made the experience of working on a laptop 500% more enjoyable and less of an uphill struggle against the trackpad, and it doesn’t require a flat surface for a mouse.