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?
XFCE minimal but good looking. You could also go for MATE or Cinnamon…
Cinnamon is my choice on both laptop and desktop, though if it’s for a particularly underpowered system, I go for MATE.