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.