As I see it, Slackware is like a clean canvas, where you can easily paint whatever you'd like. I turned my gf's laptop in a perfectly functional media player, at the same time without sacrificing those things she needs for University and stuff, like OOffice, firefox, the likes. My desktop suits my needs of development and research, the usual stuff you'd expect from a "geek". And it's still blazing fast. I'm not making the point that you can't achieve this level of versatility in any other distro, far from that, but Slack makes this considerably easier to deploy.