On my Dell laptop, MS Vista lists the networks available and their strengths and allows me to choose one and it always works. Of course, I prefer Linux. Slackware 12 was my preferred flavor of system, but it just tried to bring up something without telling me what it was and often failed. I bought Slackware 13 but cannot figure out what it is all about. Ubuntu is like magic in that it lists the networks just like Windows does and always works. But I want to try Java tutorials and stuff, and Ubuntu discourages one from performing "root" operations and thus rather discourages text mode operating. I know I could try all known systems, but does anyone know of a not-just-for-beginners distribution that does wireless without effort?

Networkmanager or Wicd will do what you're asking. Networkmanager is the default in Ubuntu. You should be able to get it in any distro you choose.

As for freedom, I had a very good experience setting up Arch Linux. I installed xfce and netorkmanager was installed by default. It's not as easy to setup as Ubuntu, but it's well documented, has a good package manager, and is faster than Ubuntu.

There's no reason you can't use Wicd or Networkmanager in Slack though. There's plenty of Slackware gurus around here that can help you with it.