I love my Charger, but it cost me an arm and a leg.

Generally, skill yourself for a career with high future demand that can be done remote, like DevOps, Data Analyst or Sharepoint Admin.
Then get hired by a company that pays well and live in an area with low cost of living.

Or like me, have a fuckton of luck, and happen upon a hippie landlord who inherited a house on a large woodland plot and lets you rent it for 500€ as long as you do all the work that needs doing and don’t bother her while she finds her true inner spirit 500 miles away in the Alps.
Then heat your home with firewood from your own plot, build your own furniture in your shed, grow your own veggies, join local food sharing and fleamarket groups, live car-free, go on camping trips for vacation and bring your cost of living down to a point where 40k€/year are plenty.

Get out of this area!!!
I work 28 hours a week as IT tech (which I have no official qualification for) and live in a house on 2 acres of land next to a nice city, while financing my wife who’s still studying.

“Slackware has no dependency management” is a meme as old as Debian, and basically the only thing people know about it.
Fact is, you install additional packages from Slackbuilds, and there’s a tool that resolves dependencies for that (slpkg). It’s not officially supported but well-maintained and it works. So in practice, it works the same way as Arch’s AUR (where absolutely everyone uses yay even though it is also not officially supported or recommended).

So, the fact that the default package manager doesn’t resolve dependencies is irrelevant in practice. What is relevant, and an actual valid criticism of Slackware, is that the default installation isn’t minimal or tailored to you, and should’t be changed unless you absolutely know what you’re doing. It gives you a wide variety of software for all kinds of tasks that wasn’t chosen by you, but by benevolent dictator Patrick Volkerding. And his choices are very different from what’s become the de facto Linux standard today (e.g. Calligra instead of LibreOffice).

My take on it is that Slackware is the perfect OS for maybe 100,000 people on earth, and I happen to be one of them.

That’ll make setting up your wifi from the command line all kinds of fun.
Even my SSID with , and : in it stumps the Debian installer.

…is irrelevant due to how Slackware works.
It installs all dependencies for the entire official repo right from the start.

I use “stable” not in the sense of “doesn’t break”, but in the sense of “doesn’t change its behaviour”.
Debian is rock solid, but Slackware is the most stable in the sense that it still looks and works pretty much exactly like it did 10-20 years ago.

Xfce is just so nice and simple.

Slackware works differently than other distros. After a default installation, dependency tracking is pointless because you install its entire repository up front.
If you need something that isn’t in the repository, you’ve got Slackbuilds that work just like Arch’s AUR. Or you can use third party repos with their own package managers, semi-official tools with depedency checking, flatpaks or whatever else you want. The point is, how you manage your packages is your choice. The default package manager is just a helpful bash script.

It’s more stable than Debian and more simple in design than Arch.
It basically doesn’t do anything, except run your hardware and software, and that’s all an OS should do.

Oh boy, here I go distro-hopping again.
Just kidding - you can pry Slackware from my cold, dead hands.

Either use Stable or Unstable. Testing is actually the most unstable of the three branches, due to how Debian works:

Updated packages are first introduced into Experimental, then into Unstable when they actually build and run. So Unstable is equivalent to Arch’s main branch.
Then they automatically enter Testing after a few weeks without anyone reporting a critical bug.

What this means: Testing is the only branch where the decision over what enters isn’t made by a human.

If someone notices critical bugs in Testing, the packages may be kicked out of Testing again until the bugs are fixed. So Testing is the only branch where packages can simply disappear when you run an update.

It’s also the most insecure branch: When a vulnerability is discovered, the packages in Stable are patched to close it. The packages in Unstable are updated to a new version that closes it. In Testing, the vulnerability stays until the new version eventually migrates down the line again after spending a while in Unstable.

I’ve run Unstable for years. IMO it’s a great rolling release distro with horrible branding.