but LXDE should effectively be considered “end of life”, the developer is in the process of porting everything over to Qt and working on releases of LXQt
with that, for a full DE – Xfce if you like GTK, LXQt if you like Qt
or a minimal setup with a WM plus utilities (like Openbox or one of the large selection of tiling window managers)
along those lines though, there are still a LOT of lightweight Linux distros to choose from
Crunchbangplusplus or BunsenLabs – successors to Crunchbang Linux – usually just Openbox WM and a few utils rather than a full DE
plain old Debian stable – proprietary drivers are now part of the installer, no more hunting for a special ISO – can choose your DE or WM during install