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
Yes, use what you know. Neither LXLE nor LXDE are end of life as claimed in other comments. The latest LXLE release is supported until 2030, which is five years longer than Windows 10.
I appreciate your response. it's good to know I'm safe running what I know. And cerement gave me some good info so I can learn more about different distros. :)