They started as a Red Hat clone, and have shipped some fairly buggy releases. I try new Red Hat, Slackware, Debian and SuSE releases and that keeps me busy enough. I shitched to Red Hat and have been very happy. Mandrake is bundled with outdated packages and has many bugs. It is well liked by newbies because of the half-decent installer.
Mandrake also leaves out some preffered libraries by default.
This is another pain. One incident I had and still cannot find what is wrong is when i tried to put fidelio on mandrake. At least so far, I will try LM 7.2.