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 laptop is no Desktop Environment installed. I am very happy with Hyprland as my Wndow Manager.
Sure, in most cases it is a lot of work to configure the features getting work in the way the user want. Additionally I have installed Gnome’s dconf framework to be able to configure GTK apps as well.
On the other hand I appreciate the development of the DEs very much. As a fan of useful defaults I see most DEs getting better with every major update.