Please do not use Slackware. With respect to Slackware, almost no one uses it because it is very old school. If I remember correctly you have to use a 3rd party tool to even download updates or packages. It took years for the maintainer to actually have a release. Please use a modern developer distro that has a regular release cycle and modern tools. Fedora or Ubuntu. If you need to use Nvidia, go with Ubuntu.
Also when did you use it? Linux distros haven't used floppy disks in so long.
> I'm an OpenCL guy, not even using CUDA, and have had a decent enough experience with AMD's drivers
That is not my field, but Fedora added the ROCm packages in 40. You can install those and give it a try.
> I still think MSVC, again with all its flaws, is the best C++ IDE (I've similarly tried them all, repeatedly over decades).
I still remember during my time in college (where they required us to use Visual C++) a friend and I were playing with the latest C++ features. We had this very difficult runtime bug. I later found notes in the news that Microsoft's implementation of C++ at the time was incomplete. Tried it in GCC-worked out of the box.