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?
haha I was being half serious here, as fun as I have with kronkite on my space heater, its is a layer of bloat on top of a mountain of bloat so not what you want in op’s case