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?
Gnome hands down had the best laptop experience. If you follow the intended workflow of using tiled windows and many workspaces you can hey very far with just the laptop screen.
However it does translate well to a desktop for the times you are docked.
The only problem is that it only supports half tiling, which is quite annoying if you are using large screens.