Mandrake was my first ever Linux too. I bought a box set which included a mousepad and a starters guide - it was imported and cost approx 20% of my monthly salary then. I had to Google at my office for guides on how to configure my dial-up modem and print those pages to try at home in the evening - it was a moment of euphoria when I could finally connect to my 256kbs account.<p>From the point of aesthetics, I think Mandrake was quite advanced - I tried some other distros at that time but none felt as well put together as Mandrake.<p>One of the things that was getting annoying for me was that I kept seeing more and more packages I wanted available as .deb compared to .rpm. At first I just force installed or compiled but that messed up the system since I was walking all over the package manager. I backed-off from installing from source and just stayed with RPM and tried newer distros e.g.  SuSE. Most articles on the web that time about installing Debian gave me the impression that I needed to be an &quot;expert&quot; (even after 3-4 years of daily Linux experience as an end-user). When Ubuntu came along, I gave the live CD a try and loved how good Gnome looked, how responsive it was, how it &quot;just worked&quot; most of the time and how 99% of the time apt-get would find me what I wanted. I briefly gave OpenSUSE a try after the Unity forced my hand to leave Ubuntu but YaST felt way too heavy handed. Been using Linux Mint for a while now and I think I&#x27;ll settle with Mint as long as they dont do &quot;weird stuff&quot;. If they do, my next and last distro would be pure Debian.