Linux

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.

GNOME

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

I'm a KDE guy and use it myself on my notebook, but GNOME with its multitouch gestures and polished (if a little inflexible) workflow is also an excellent fit.

I'm the type of person who gets tired of a DE after using it for too long, so I'm using Budgie right now and I really like it. However XFCE is pretty nice, too, it's what I used to use.

Cinnamon for me, It looks like old Windows

xfce since it came default with eos and its pretty lightweight

GNOME, despite the critiques it receives it's the most polished one and the one that gives me less problems

I love Sway and been using it for a year or so. Never looked back

I like Enlightenment. It uses 400 MB of RAM on my old 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.

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.

i3 and never looked back!

I recently switched to xfce.
I used KDE exclusively since 2004. That's a very long time but KDE Plasma in combination with nvidia got worse, what felt like, every single day over the last years, so it finally came to the point where I had no choice to look for something that works better.
Super happy with xfce after I set it up almost exactly like my KDE setup. Sure there are some thing that are not as "well rounded" than some of the excellent Plasma features but over all it works great!

@aMalayali KDE - desktop or laptop.

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.

Tried many, but Xfce won for me:

• great keyboard support (tiling windows, virtual desktops, etc.)
• doesn't get in the way
• compact re UI (don't like modern GNOME look with lots of whitespace)
• lightweight

And even though I use terminals a lot (neovim, git, etc.), I never stuck with tiling window managers in the end (e.g. i3). Rather I'm heavily relying on:

• virtual desktops (8 or so)
• manual window tiling via shortcuts
• tmux

Plasma. I have it configured to match my workflow.

On laptops Gnome has a big advantage in the multitouch gestures for the touchpad, and as everyone says it's pretty polished. But lately I've been using KDE since it offers a lot more functionality and customization out of the box. Most of it's apps are like a swiss army knife and I love that. KDE is also catching up in the multitouch gesture department.

I really love the simplicity of dwm (I haven't quite understood the difference between a WM and a DE). It's hackable and efficient and just the way it should be. It runs really well on my age old ThinkPad. For more user friendly environments (i.e. desktops which not only I use) and more performant machines, I still use GNOME though.

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

XFCE works for me!

Always going back to dwm.

Plasma.

I find cinnamon to strike a nice balance of speed and function if you have an ok processor, it's straight to the point and doesn't try to make you use summoning circle on your trackpad to do anything, like gnome does, but still has enough features and native configs to not make you feel like you're missing anything.

Plasma KDE.
I prefer the typical Windows like layout and it offers a lot of customization options that the other DEs are missing.

i3
the less I need a mouse on a laptop, the better

edit: ok, you specifically asked for a full fledged DE and not just a WM. well, I picked what I needed and with Manjaro i3 as base, I had a nice place to start

I'm using xfce everywhere, it's simply the most lightweight and I got so used to fast reactivity that I couldn't care less about barebone icons (and even those have come a long way since).

MATE has been pretty good to use so far. Simple and straight to the point

KDE customize to how ever you like to use it!

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.

xfce. Lightweight, stays out of my way, and doesn’t eat up much screen real estate.

XFCE is my favourite on both desktop and laptop. It's light weight, has all the features I need and feels really snappy, especially when all animations are turned off (which I always do).

I like Mate. On both laptop and desktop.

I haven't tried Gnome since they trashed the UI ;) and I wasn't ever much of a KDE fan so the only desktop I have ever used since the demise of Gnome 2 is XFCE.

However I've switched back to Window Maker (a window manager) on my main PC and on my VM's and I may do so on my laptops too. I don't really need a desktop so to speak, I just use wmsystray to add a system tray and things like NetworkManager, bluez etc all end up there giving me what I actually do use of a desktop.

I recommen GNOME, but I usually use Hyprland.

If I want to use a graphical user interface, I generally use KDE Plasma.