The Gnome desktop under Mandrake 8.0 tends to lock up (at least on my 64m Cyrix M200).

I loved 7.2; 8.0 is little better than Windows, stability-wise, in my experience... I did like Mandrake 7.1 and 7.2, though. I've upgraded a lot of things since installing, and it's a lot better now, but 8.0 shook my faith in the distro ('Course, it was a 'dot-zero' release, so I was also kind of expecting some wierdness). I'm sure you'll be able to fix anything that comes up (I have been able to, after all *grin*) - you might not have any trouble on true Pentiums for that matter - but, well, "Beware".