Mandrake was my first successful Unix-like experience as well - I had spend a few days trying to get Red Hat to work at one point, but it never did (video card drivers were the issue IIRC). Mandrake actually worked and let me play around with it. I dual booted it for awhile but it didn't really catch on with me; nonetheless it was an important first experience. (Later a friend convinced me to install FreeBSD and I took to that much better. I avoided Linux for years after that in favor of BSD, though eventually I moved to Debian for most cases. Keep being tempted to go back to FreeBSD though...)