I've been using slack on and off for about 6 months now. I've also recently got hooked on 3d graphics and have been working with maya 6.5 unlimited. Anyway, my friends have been advocating fedora core 4 since I've been having trouble installing maya 6.5 on slackware.
They've been tuting how great fc4 is compared to slack, but I'm relunctant to make the switch. That's why I came to this forum for some reasons to stick with slack.

Search the forum You'll find over 100 reasons to stick to slack.

I don't like dissing other distros.. i respect all distros of linux, but i'm sorry to say so, that redhat and fedora is horrible... seriously pants.. (heck, even redhat dropped its desktop edition OS a while ago). I tried using it since 1997, and its still the same.. and its packaging is horrible.

If anything, the community and user support is the most important thing to have, and Slack's is fantastic imo. This, alone, should be the biggest reason for you to stick with slack.

Use what you know. I doubt that Maya will install better on FC4, unless you are trying to convert an RPM and install it, then you have to decide how much you want to run it.
Or be silly and use Xen to run FC4 as a virtual client.

As u got an licence for Maya 6.5 they can provide u with real slackware packages.
If u read the files on the cd u will c that.
Now u can get it to work by rpm2tgz and add some symlinks and licence.
Also i think u better run ldconfig -v /usr/aw/maya6.5/lib/
And u might need to MAYA_LOCATION, AW_COMMON, NLSPATH and put /usr/aw/maya6.5/bin/ into path.
But i would rather ask Maya team for an slackware package.
And yes u can get it to work with Slackware just as good as on an fc4 distro.
But there also some real good free tools that should do the job.