It's where I started
Mandriva was the first distro I used on a regular basis. I used to like their management tools that helped to keep you away from the command line, which really helped me get going with Linux. I think it could have actually made a good distro for normal people if it wasn't for all the infighting and forking. It's too few people spread too thinly now. I switched to Kubuntu - and realised why everybody says apt is so good, I shudder when I think about urpmi now.