Geoff, I use SUSE 9.2. I can't be sure but I think comments here in some thread or other counted amongst the reasons for me going that way. I apologise that I can't be more specific than that but I honestly can not remember. All I can say is that I'm happy with the product.

I do have a version of Mandrake 8.1 kicking around here somewhere. My objection to that concerned some hardware problems and harddrake (their hardware support thing). None of the web links they were suppose to support I wanted (or maybe even a lookup) worked and I was less than impressed.

That said, if you have a free copy and I'm understanding you correctly, I'd say give it a whirl and see how you get on with it in your "experiment". The "feel" you get for running apps will really come down to KDE or other window manager such as gnome anyway.