I tried Mandrake for two weeks before switching to Gentoo. Mandrake was ok, easy to install and such, but I never really cared for the rpm system. Gentoo's solution with ports was exacly what I was looking for. If I were to switch from Gentoo I would choose Debian, Ubuntu or VidaLinux.
Check out
distrowatch to see which distributions that are "hip" at the moment.