I don't understand why everyone is saying experienced users can't run mandrake. I personally have 5 years linux experience. I've installed Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, and LFS. Right now I have Two Mandrake desktops/laptops, a Debian server, and an LFS router (and those are only my own computers). There is no one good distribution out there.
Red Hat used to be good for servers, but I've only heard bad reviews of 8 and 9 regarding stability. I have not used 8 or 9, but I can say the 7.x line was extremely stable.
Mandrake is amazing at what its designed to use. I wouldn't even think of installing it on a server. But I run it on my own systems (posting on one right now) because it just works. I can plug in a USB drive and two seconds later an icon pops up on my desktop when I'm running as non-root. Likewise, there's an icon on my desktop for a scanner and one for my TV card. I didn't have to set up anything while I was installing it, it was able to figure everything out. I do have it customized the way I like it, but I don't want to have to mess with the command line just to be able to read something off a camera. Yes, I know how to do it, but personally, I'd much rather everything be done automatically for me. I can live with crashes once in a while (though its rarely happened to me unless I was messing around with the system first), because I save enough time with everything else in mandrake that one crash a year doesn't make a dent in the time I saved configuring stuff. Plus urpmi works very well.
Debian is also quite good. I do have to say the GUI is set up relatively well, and the system is very stable. I think the big plus for debian is the quality of the packages. There are packages for almost every piece of software I've needed, and recompiling packages works quite well and in my opinion is easier than with RPMs. Plus the packages are built very nicely and it seems the maintainers actually try to package the software well, rather than just throwing together a package quickly. I'm reccomending Debian as a server linux distribution now (I just recently repalced Red Hat 7.1 on my server with debian, and I really like it for servers).
LFS also has its strong points. It is unbelievably stable - the only time I've had a problem with my router is when the PCI card got dislodged while I was moving the case around. And even then the system did not go down. On the other hand, LFS is hard and time-consuming to install. I only did it because I didn't want to have to deal with a package manager since I wasn't planning on changing the software on that computer (no user accounts, and only bind and dhcp running).
I considered Gentoo for my server, but decided against it. Why? Because I didn't want to spend days compiling everything. True, my server is rather powerful (dual athlon 1600), but I wanted to test this system out first, and my fastest desktop is a p3 900 (I don't play games, so the speed doesn't matter to me that much). I would've had to wait a week while everything was being compiled (and my desktop was unusable), just to test a OS I wasn't sure I'd like. Plus upgrading a package would mean recompiling it. I'm sure all you gentoo users are happy with your 5% performance gain, but I'd rather spend the time you guys spend compiling doing useful things.
Oh, and the reason I switchted over to linux is stability, configurability, and ease of development. I do a lot of UNIX development, so its easier to have everything UNIX. Crossover Office lets me run the windows applications I need (office, quicken), so I'm happy.
Just my two cents.