For me personally, I love KDE4 and really churn at the thought of using gnome (any version) and its derivatives.
I administer/maintain the build system on a large redhat installation, and hence, the familiarity of the underlying code/config
makes my life easy, but I dont really like fedora, although if Mandriva had not been saved by Mageia (my opinion)
I would have probably moved to fedora, with KDE4, and spend weeks trying to get it to look like M*.
Thats leads me on the another aspect of Mageia, it takes me two mins to install the themes i like under KDE (win7 and vistar7) (yes i like the windows look, just not the product) and its exactly like i want it.
Then theres my friends and neighbours and relatives.
I can install Mageia in place of windows, and almost (maybe spend an hour showing them) walk away, and not have to return.
Thats what windows is supposed to be like.....
I noticed (although we should ignore it) that the last 7 days of distrowatch put Mageia at no 2 bellow Mint and above ubuntu.
Nice while it lasts......
Ive just finished loading Mageia 2 64 on a jetway atom 230 with 1 gig of ram and a sloooow harddisk, just to make sure that my fav apps all work, etc.
looks quite nice.
not sure i like the kde slide/side bars, need to see if i can change those.
otherwise really nice.
regards peter