I think you’d be fine doing a Slackware install if you choose your desktop environment during the installation - that way you don’t have to worry about dependencies.
The biggest differences you’d encounter when installing Slackware as opposed to most other linux distributions is that you have to do the disk partitioning before running the setup with Slackware, and it is done through the fdisk utility.
I most recently installed Slackware on an older laptop with a SATA drive. I will run the installer on a newer laptop with NVMe storage and see if I can identify the ‘gotcha’ moments or things to keep in mind.
Another option, if you are just looking for a unix-like but don’t necessarily need Linux per se, might be OpenBSD - version 6.7 or newer purport to support the wireless card. OpenBSD’s installer is comparable to Slackware’s in terms of ease of use, so that might not be a big help. You don’t have to worry about systemd on BSD systems, but you may not find the software you want to install in a BSD package or port.
I’ll try the Slackware install again on something more modern tonight and report back.