GNOME

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!

I use kde on my laptop

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.

xfce since it came default with eos and its pretty lightweight

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

sway, the i3 clone for Wayland. I'm really happy with it, even on my Intel iGPU + Nvidia GPU 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.

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

@aMalayali KDE - desktop or laptop.

I have not used a desktop environment on a laptop in a very long time. For a long while, I had fluxbox installed and that was good enough. Nowadays, my laptop almost exclusively runs EXWM. I can't really recommend that for general use though.

If I were to install a full DE now, I think I would go for LXQT. I love Openbox, and I would probably end up replacing the panel with tint2. That would be a decent environment, I think.

On my laptops I like the same one as on my desktops: KDE Plasma. With any other I quickly start missing the features that KDE Plasma offers and the configurability and customizability. And It is also quite lightweight for all that it offers. Others often offer much less and consume more resources then KDE Plasma.

XFCE works for me!

DE: KDE & Cinnamon. WM: Awesome & I3

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.

Cinnamon for me, It looks like old Windows

KDE customize to how ever you like to use it!

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!

LXDE

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.

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

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

KDE on Manjaro.

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 because the window/workspace management is very good on a single monitor, and the touchpad gestures are nice.

I always come back to KDE for it's easy of customization. Don't like the effect that happens when you minimize or maximize screens? Simply go into the settings and download a new one.

KDE can be made to run really light, or really heavy.

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.

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 use EXWM with desktop-environment.el. It's pretty bad for almost everything unless you reallyyyy like emacs keybinds.

However, if you just want everything in emacs, it pretty perfectly scratches that itch.

Plasma.

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

Plasma. I have it configured to match my workflow.

I like Mate. On both laptop and desktop.

I've been using NixOS with Pantheon and I'm pretty happy with it.

I usually prefer DE's based on my needs.

KDE plasma - for customization and features.
GNOME - for UI and simplicity.
cinnamon - for windows like and simple.

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

Same on my desktop: XFCE4.

I recommen GNOME, but I usually use Hyprland.

Hyprland is my go to, but it requires a lot of effort compared to proper DEs. I really like KDE as long as you don't ask too much of it. The UI is nice & it doesn't use too much battery if you cut down on effects.

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

I use Gnome on my Thinkpad. That machine has an i7 and 16gb of ram. Ok my tiny Chromebook I got Mate. Very lightweight and almost as many features as Gnome.

@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.