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?
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
Yeah i use gnome on my laptop, desktop, and tablet. Works great on all, but thrives on the tablet and laptop
XFCE minimal but good looking. You could also go for MATE or Cinnamon…
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.
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.
I agree with this! I run i3 for all my builds and it’s great!