Well, mainly I was young and still exploring a fresh and vibrant scene (much unlike the relatively mature Linux of today), so that was half of it. The other ha

Well, mainly I was young and still exploring a fresh and vibrant scene (much unlike the relatively mature Linux of today), so that was half of it. The other half was that whenever I searched for an RPM for something I needed, it was almost always a Mandrake or RH package. RH was a pain with things like MP3s and proprietary drivers, so Mandrake seemed obvious. And yeah, SaX/YaST was a little clunkier than Drak. I went to Fedora Core in their first version because the third party repositories became seamless enough and they were easily the best supported, especially for on-the-edge software. Went through some Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Pop_OS! etc days in-between there but have mostly settled on Fedora KDE, these days.