Ready to buy a new computer and make the switch to Linux. I am looking at picking up slackware 11 when it comes out but I have one question: Does all or any of linux distros make use of more than one CPU core (ie core 2 duo)? It's probably more of a kernel question than distro right? Forgive the inexperience.

Yeah it's a kernel question and as far as I know, Linux should work all right wit dualcore cpus. After all, it has supported multiple cpus longer than Windows, so I can't see a problem with a dualcore, that's basically two processing units inside one box.

I've also read a news story that said Linux works all right with dualcore, as does Windows. Except that today not many programs, not including the OS itself, can make use of the dualcore system; few new games can, and some apps, but especially on Windows those apps that can take use of the dualcore are a minority. Can't say about Linux though..

Yup. Compile your kernel with Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) support and you should be good to go.

As far as applications, here's a quote from this article,

"...your application software must also be multi-threaded. One sure-fire way to verify that all of your applications are getting the best performance in a multi-core machine is to compile them yourself. This is easy to do on GNU/Linux distributions like Gentoo, and on most BSD variants."