It was actually pretty popular here in Europe (I have a feeling the core devs were French, but I could be wrong).

Same! So I guess there are at least 3 of us :)

Memories…

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.

Same, broadcom wifi issues and 3dfx driver issues for my voodoo card but mandrake mostly just worked.

I eventually learned enough to install debian-netinst and get everything working, probably within about a year.

Exactly the same here ;) I also ended using Debian when I learned enough.

SuSE for me (well, actually, FreeBSD in between, and MacOS the whole time). But same difference.

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.