I needed a distro for my new box, but I had no intention of playing around too much with config files. I do this on my laptop all the time, but this system just needed to work decently out of the box. I decided to go back to mandrake for this, coming from slackware. I used to like mandrake when I started out, so it seemed like a positive idea.

It definitely was. After burning the RC1 isos I ran through an easy installation (still looks exactly the same like it used to, about a year ago), and shortly after, I had my system up and running with everything I needed to have. But I'll work more orderly:

PRO:
* Good hardware recognition: I plugged in my digital camera and it just put an icon on my desktop that linked to gtkam, ready to download the pictures I took.
* Installation is a breeze, and it managed to discover about everything I have in my machine pretty well.
* Very easy to go through basic configuration (using their tools, obviously)

CON:
* I had some trouble getting my sound to work perfectly (it couldn't mix two sounds playing at the same time), but thanks to this site I managed to track down the problem and fix it.
* Sound came muted, whereas I would expect it to be up (definitely in a distro that claims to be the easiest of the bunch)
* SysV init. Okay, personal preference, but after about a year of slackware I got so used to it that even loading modules at boot seemed a daunting task :) after taking a deep breath the problem was solved though ;-)
* Compiling things seems like hell, and I decided to just use urpmi instead (seems like the easier, safer way for now).

It's not my favourite distro, but for some reason I tend to keep it close for when I need a quick install with little configuration problems afterwards.