The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Thank you for the Slackware test -- as a regular -current tester on the desktop, moving to a
notebook for my academic travels, I know it will need a good bit of hacking (it always does),
and especially to be power-efficient.  However, from desktop experience, I know that it's a
potential contender after enough configuring.  Which is precisely not what you were looking
for.  But 12.1 has made significant strides toward being amenable to that purpose in the first
place, with firmware included.

12.1 has advanced its old-fashioned defaults to one extent, and that is that LILO now has a
graphic option.  :)  Still, GRUB is in /extra, and comes with setup programs that will be
familiar to LILO users under Slackware.

Always the caveat, "given enough hacking, Slackware can do anything".  ;)