And for 49.95 you can't beat the price - unless you can get it for free. As far as Samba goes, it took about ten minutes to set up my Linux box as a network server for my Win95 machine. And my internet connections with Linux run about twice as fast as the same connection with Win95.
All programs are interchangable between distributions.
You can use rpm on Slackware, Debian, Caldera, etc. You can use anything that Slackware offers on the other distributions also. Only the setup program is diffrent. The desktop is coming. KDE has what it takes.