I actually find that GNOME is worse on laptops. My X1C6 is running at effectively 1600x900 and the amount of vertical space wasted by the height and padding of GNOME/GTK titlebars and widgets drives me crazy.
With KDE on a laptop I just set up the dock vertically on the righthand side and I'm good to go.
GNOME's workspace switcher/overview thing is better than anything KDE has though. It's much closer in function and polish to macOS than KDE is.
Maybe there's some extension to fix this now, but I always hated how GNOME's workspaces were just small boxes on the opposite side of the overview button/hot corner. And even more so that they were a row, not a grid. KDE's exposé-like grid that separates all the windows on all the workspaces is so much more useful to me (not sure if that's enabled by default though).
With KDE on a laptop I just set up the dock vertically on the righthand side and I'm good to go.
GNOME's workspace switcher/overview thing is better than anything KDE has though. It's much closer in function and polish to macOS than KDE is.