In the early days of my Linux use I was on Mandrake 7.2 and loved it. All the "just in case" random packages were very entertaining and educational to me, although they were probably a distraction from whatever I was meant to be doing!
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).
As the sibling comment says, was relatively popular here in Europe. It was my first GNU/Linux disto. I had problems installing Debian in a laptop with a nasty Wifi PCMCIA card, Mandrake was able to make it work.
Me too! Count me in! Mandriva was my first ever Linux distro! It was so long ago that I forgot it happened. I came to think that was Ubuntu, but it came after Mandriva and after Ubuntu I was on Debian, of course. Now it’s Arch on my laptop and Fedora on my desktops.
Still, the experience seems to have served me well in the end. I do miss that feeling of discovering all the weird themes and window managers they packaged by default, I don't get the same vibes of "any UI is possible" these days (even though the UX is probably much better by conventional criteria).