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?
KDE
If there was a modern Window Maker, I would use that. I mean with a notification area and when I minimize Firefox or Chrome I don’t get five icons in the corner and it works as a Wayland compositor and supports HiDPI scaling.
I just use Window Maker. It got an update recently. Notifications work out of the box, Firefox and Chrome have never created multiple icons, not seen that.
It is not a Wayland compositor which is fine as I only use X11 and probably won’t use Wayland for many more years till it’s mature enough. I went back to Window Maker several years ago and it’s working just fine. With
wmsystemtrayI have a system tray so things like NetworkMakager and hplip and blue-z all can latch on and display their icons, I don’t need a desktop environment now!YMMV regarding the HIDPI thing, I have never had a monitor with such a narrow pixel pitch to need anything like that.