“not the greatest at gaming” is still perfectly fine – the main argument against Debian stable (at least for gamers) is that, since Debian’s focus is on stability, they’re not riding the bleeding edge of updates and features
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
(not only have none of these companies made any effort at improvement, they’ve consistently gotten worse as time goes by – remember one comedian commenting “the bar was on the ground and y’all brought shovels”)
if you decide on Gnome, keep in mind there are two main paths to follow – stock Gnome (“as the developers intended”) and Gnome with extensions (ie. addons or plugins or mods) – extensions can do everything from minor aesthetic tweaks (Blur My Shell, Rounded Corners, Remove Rounded Corners) right on up to completely changing the behavior of the window manager (PaperWM, Pop Shell) – which side of that particular divide you end up on is purely personal preference