I've used Mandriva (nee Mandrake) in more modern times, though I started life on Slackware many moons ago. Since I had a variety of PowerPC based machines, Mandriva distros served me well. It always seemed a very clean install, lots of device support, reasonable default application configurations and a good suite of admin tools.

Having said all that, I have just installed a Linux partition on my desktop XP system (partly so I can use all the Linux toys on the Midi soundcards, amplifiers and other hardware plugged into that machine) and I chose Fedora core 5 since I happened to have a DVD around the place (from a magazine) with the latest distribution on there. It did install, though the boot manager didn't work first time. There are a number of things that aren't installed by default, and Fedora seem to have an issue bundling some software, but since it is *so* popular there are a million sites out there to yum from. Quite impressed so far ..