Slackware is much more 'Unixy' then regular Linux distributions.
It's for people that don't like a lot of cruft and little dialogs and all sorts of little things you have to deal with if your using something like Redhat or Ubuntu.
But it's those extra things that make Ubuntu usable for most people.
Any Linux distribution can be made to work on older hardware. Out of the box Ubuntu does use about as much resources as a modern XP desktop. It's quite heavy.
That doesn't mean you have to live with it, of course. You can disable this and that and use light weight alternatives for common gnome applications and get Ubuntu to run very well on older hardware.
It's the same thing for Fedora or Slackware (Slack uses KDE by default) or anything else.
Of course it's easier just to use Xubuntu and have it more or less optimized.
You can get it to be quite a bit smaller then what Xubuntu uses, but it's easier to start off with that.
For very old hardware, like 32-64megs of RAM on 200Mhz proccessor you start having to do more dramatic things that are not easily done with Ubuntu or Xubuntu or anything like that.
Probably I would expect minimal requirements for Xubuntu to run well are:
400mhz machine with between 128 and 256 megs of RAM.
Also running 16bit graphics instead of 24bit (called 32bit in Windows) will lead to a much more responsive desktop. Also for installing Xubuntu you will want to use the 'alternative' installation cdrom, rather then the live cdrom. The Live cdrom uses MUCH more resources to run then what you need after you have it installed on your computer.
A nice thing to check out for very low resource machines is 'Damn Small Linux', or DSL.. It will make _any_ computer fly. Also it can be modified to have compatability with Debian so that you have lots of packages aviable for it (unoptimized packages, of course).
For DSL the minimal requirements are:
A 486DX2 computer with 16megs of RAM.
This will be capable of playing MP3s and ogg/vorbis files as well as surf the web and do email.. just barely. For a comfortable desktop environment you want to have a 200mhz P2 with 64megs of RAM. This will enable you to have a good experiance as well as multitask effectively. If you have a machine with 128 megs of RAM you can run DSL entirely in RAM and have everything be tremendously fast.
The original goal for DSL is to get the maximum amount of functionality to fit into a 50meg drive.
It's perfect for running it from a pen flash drive.
For more functionality you can go with DSL-N
DSL-N is a variation of DSL that adds more applications with more functionality, but the try to keep the requirements very light also.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/
Minimal recommended requirements are a 300mhz proccessor with 64megs of RAM.
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