I've tried FC3 and quite liked it, so I thought I'd have a look to see what else the Linux community has to offer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was meant to be free? Mandrake say they have a free version available, but it's not immediately obvious. Also, I'm really not clear about what the differences are between different Linux builds and versions.

Linux itself is the small kernel in every linux distrobution and is free, everything in top of that is what seperates one distrobution from another and isn't necessarily free!

Most of the distro's have a free version, If you have a good look Mandrake have a free version. It doesn't necessarily mean it isn't that different sometimes the bought versions come with gui's to handle the set up of servers, etc and come with support. Red Hat has Fedora Core 2 I believe and if you are feeling up to it take a look at Debian. Debian is completely free although not as friendly but if you know what you are doing you can install over the net getting the apps that you want using apt-get their package manager.

While Mandrake does indeed provide it's distros free, they are after all a company with employees, and they do need to generate income. Their income comes, of course, from distributing CDs and printed manuals, support, etc... Look around a bit on their site and you'll find their download mirrors, but if you can you should try to support them with some $$.

Some linkage :)

http://distrowatch.com/
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
http://www.linuxiso.org/index.php
http://www.linuxquestions.org/

Enjoy!