If you haven’t tried them, I recommend giving them a try. They all have something to offer.

I don’t use Gnome, for example. People knock on it a bit BUT a large group of people swear by it for workflow.

KDE Plasma is the dream for anyone who likes to tweak settings. I used it on my laptop for a long time and it is very convenient. It also manages power and monitor settings very well. In terms of memory usage it is now similar to XFCE.

XFCE is perfect for people who don’t like change. It is a slow moving DE; tried and true.

Right now I am using LXQt. Not sure why I decided to do that. It looks ok. It is fast and light. That’s it’s claim to fame. It can be used with different WMs which is nice.

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 can’t say I’ve ever looked into it. But, I found that KDE handled things very well. I used my laptop for full workdays, getting 11 hours out of it.

i3 and never looked back!

XFCE minimal but good looking. You could also go for MATE or Cinnamon…

Of the ones I tried, my top 3 would be cinnamon, budgie, and kde. KDE is probably the best bet for modern features ATM, cinnamon for simplicity.

Cinnamon for me, It looks like old Windows

Tiling window managers like i3 are imho nice for laptops, since they do not waste any space and can be easily controllen via keyboard. Takes a while to get used to them, however.

@aMalayali KDE - desktop or laptop.

I recently switched from i3 to hyprland and quite like it. Wayland still has some issues, but the better scaling makes it worth it.

Started out with xfce, used lxde for a short while… it was too minimalistic for my taste. Tried KDE for about a week, that was the oposite, too flashy. Went back to xfce, haven’t tried anything else since. It’s a sweet spot IMO.

GNOME

xfce since it came default with eos and its pretty lightweight

Gnome hands down has the best laptop experience. If you follow the intended workflow of using tiled windows and many workspaces. You can get to a very large number of windows, without getting lost, even with just the laptop screen.

Additionally the paradigm does translate well to a desktop for the times you are docked.

I’m the weirdo over in the corner using TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment, forked from KDE3) on both my desktop and laptop.

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.