@T159 I'll be very honest with you, my experience with Fedora and Mandriva is zero. The last distro of Fedora I used was FC4, and Mandriva, well Mandrake 8.2. I can't say about Mandriva, but Fedora does not match the ease of use of OpenSuSE.
One strong point I find in OpenSuSE is YaST, one place where you can find EVERYTHING and configure stuff easily. It's like a big control panel. In case you did not know, YaST even works in CLI mode. Try pressing CTRL+Alt+F1 and login, and type yast at prompt and press Enter. So even if your display fails for any reason you can repair it in CLI mode using YaST. If you however want to fiddle around with config files and do things the hard way you can try other distros, even Slackware
To the best of my knowledge, you have to subscribe for software updates in Mandriva, they are not free, which i why I would not recommend it.
Bottom line, do you want to learn linux, technical? You have to look beyond OpenSuSE. If you just want to enjoy your linux look no further.