Slackware is good if your main objective is to put yourself in a position where you will "have to" learn a thing or 2. So wi fi doesn't work and a few other things on the basis that Mr P.V works along the basis of it can't be presumed you want this or this running ,so I won't autostart stuff you will have to manually enable it; unless you made the choice at installation.
Now if you take package management a lot of packages are still put together via slackbuilds.org ; one reason is that you can come unstuck if you go straight for a ready to install pkg because if there is some pre-work to do , the pkg will install but may not work.
A typical example is clamav - it needs groups etc setting up. For packages that have deps you have to build them manually to. Now thats great when you have to get the slackbuild for each dep , read about them etc because your leaning . if however you just want stuff installed with no fuss, them Slackware can be tedious. As of yet there is no decent system of package management and their deps. I did have a lot of success using
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/system/slpkg/?search=slpkg which now seems to be ok with slackware15. Last time i used slackware i was using current and slpkg didn't work.
Long term i'm not sure whats going to happen with Slackware; quite frankly its very vulnerable with basically one benevolent dictator that couldn't Offord to fix his house roof at one point . Software range doesn't match other OS's and slackbuilds is actually maintained by volunteers - so in theory i'm still maintaining this one :
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/academic/latex2html/?search=latex2html in fact though i haven't done anything with it for ages and currently don't have a PC with slackware.
Documentation is basically dead and there was a stupid competition between 2 fractions or groups .One headed by Alien Bob. I submitted and had documentation accepted at ALien bob site for docs . It didn't look to me that other users could be bothered to check and correct it or comment on it. I will say I found Alien Bob most courteous and he did some corrections, also setting out at the beginning and made suggestions. It just seemed lack of interest from the other site users apart from Alien.
eg
https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:misc:anatomy_of_a_slackbuild
Otherwise slackware is very stable and once you get to know it, fine if it meets your requirements. very little updating to be done ; security updates are installed by getting packages released from time to time.
Now Arch could be a hell of a pain if your located where Internet is either flaky or expensive. Downloads it seem if your prudent have to be done every day and it can range from half a a few mb's to half a gig. I don't think i would be able to use Arch back in Ghana.
Choice of software is huge if you take into account AUR and i've submitted one so far :
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fetchmirrorsgui i basically did it , to see if i could understand the way the system built packages. I have a small project for my daughter set up on local host and didn't find it that hard to set up and get working . So far, its been about 6 months now Arch has not broken ; i've had a couple of occurrences where software doesn't work but that was for a couple of days until libs caught up . There is some minor maintenance .such has keeping pkg backups to 2 versions .BAsically three commands does it for me
Code:
sudo du -sh ~/.cache //get cache size
rm -rf ~/.cache/* //clean cache
sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=50M
sudo paccache -rk 2 //clean up backups to 2
Some things install like a dream for instance tor browser . I haven't had any dependency hell with Arch which i did have with Debian based. So far i'm pretty much totally satisfied with Arch and no need to try out other OS- but who knows ?
if you are going to install Arch do it manually that way you read up and understand a lot before you start using . i started reading install arch by itsfoss to break myself in easy then cross referenced a few other sites before going to Arch wiki.