I purchased Mandrake Linux in a box (7.0) back in 2000 at CompUSA. It was amazing, you got every possible desktop environment to play with. I loved it despite the hate and vitriol focused on Mandrake users who were using a "kid distro" by the Debian and Red Hat users. Mandrake was the Linux Mint/POP!_OS of its era. I recently tried Mageia 8 and it was pretty decent. I am impressed, but due to some hardware issues with System 76 laptops, I had to transition to Fedora for the later kernels. Mageia still had that Mandrake feel to it, that was so impressive. I cannot say too much bad about it.

I installed Mandrake in 2003, it was a good system. I had everything working and learned a lot about linux on Mandrake. I stayed with it into the Mandriva era. As I remember, Mandrake folded because they tried to earn enough money selling services to support thier staff. Lack of funds was their death nell.

I switched to Slackware at that point, and am still there today. I had installed Slackware version 8 before Mandrake. It took me a very long time to get a working system. Mandrake was much easier to install at that time.