Greetings.
I used to live in Springfield, so when you say near Dayton, or even southwest Ohio, I get a very clear picture, even though I now live in Columbus.
I'm interested in Slackware, because I installed Mint as my first distro, and I find I can do almost everything in the GUI without the CLI. But I know if I move on to Slackware, I will really know Linux. So, today, Puppy and Mint, but tomorrow, Slackware.