Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Well, the 64-bit problem has long been solved, and by the way Slackware is one of the last distros I know of that still supports 32-bit x86 as a first-class citizen. I use slapt-get with Slackware64-current. It updates the packages in a rolling release fashion. Things do break, mostly when a package depends on a new shared library and I don't have that shared library installed because it just got added to the archive. There are definitely ways to fix that automatically -- probably as simple as doing "slapt-get --install-set l" or something -- but it never annoyed me enough to figure out how.

If you'd prefer a more traditional experience, you definitely can upgrade from one Slackware release to another without needing to perform a full reinstall (and my goodness, I'm sorry you didn't know that back then!).

http://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/U...