GNOME

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.

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).

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

i3 and never looked back!

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

xfce since it came default with eos and its pretty lightweight

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

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.

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’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 use kde on my laptop

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.

@aMalayali I’m quite happy with Cinnamon in the moment but I know what you mean. If my daily work experience with Cinnamon would suffer, I would also go back to XFCE.