Yep. Stuck with Slack for a loooong time. Eventually settled on Arch when Slack wasn't getting frequent enough updates for me to run what I needed to. I tried Gentoo in between but that was brutal on some of my ancient hardware.
Trying now to install slackware15 on virtualbox but can't get it to do anything so more reading up on vbox. My favorite now is Manjaro xfce and it runs smoothly all the time.