mandriva cooker was a great lesson to me too, with it i learned a lot about linux, i learned to love KDE (still do - kde is my main DE), unfortunately i had to leave mandriva (not because of the breakages) and that day i reformatted 3 partitions
yeahh, i know about mageia, been following the progress since the fork (even as part of the mailing list - not active though), but it's just not the same, the magic is broken
sorry for all this rant, i hope you enjoy your staying with LMDE