I kinda like Mandriva. They have a control center that is a little similar to Yast. Their handling of the network is really cool too. I used it on my netbook for a while before I shift back to Ubuntu.
As for
free software vs open source, a quick overview.
In 1984 a guy called Richard Stallman was working at the CS lab in MIT. He was an operating system developer, working on a version of UNIX. He got really upset when companies stopped sharing the source code and put licensing limitations to the use of software (it might look normal today, but until the late 70s, source code was passed naturally through all programmers). Anyway he quits his job and founded the
Free Software Foundation, whose goal is to create a clone of Unix that is entirely
free he called GNU. As Stallman himself puts it, think of "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". There are four freedoms that a free software should respect. I do not remember them exactly, but they include the freedom of modifying a software to suit you, the freedom to redistribute and copy a software, the freedom to use a software as you see fit, ... (For example, though it is technically possible to do it, it is illegal to install Mac OS X on a non-Apple hardware. In this sense MacOS does not respect Stallman's freedoms). He started by developing a C compiler (GCC) then a C debugger (GDB), then a text editor (emacs - the only text editor that is possibly more powerful than VI. It can virtually do anything). He also rights the GPL, a legal license that grants the freedoms to the users. Slowly people from across the globe joined him (the 80s were the beginnings of the democratisation of the internet). The GNU project was born. More info on GNU on their
website.
Linux is not a whole operating system. It is only one part (the main part) of the system called the kernel. Mandriva, Ubuntu, SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora, Debian, Mint, Android, Chrome OS, ... all these systems use Linux as a kernel, but use many more programs on top of it. Usually these programs come from the GNU project. This is why the majority of these sytems call themselves GNU/Linux systems.
Let's continue our history trip, and move forward to 1991. The GNU project has evolved and is now well known in academics circles. A lot of students see in GNU a cheap way to get a unix station at home, as well as a great way to study some professional code. However, GNU is not ready at all. They were still missing a kernel, the central piece of the OS. (
Hurd their own kernel is still in development today).
At the same time, on a totally unrelated project, a 21 year-old student in Helsinki Finland starts working on his own kernel. His name is Linus Torvalds. He calls his system Linux and publishes it on the internet under a GPL license. Because of its simplicity, stability and wel written code, Linux quickly became the most popular of the free Unix systems out there.
By 1998, Linux had more than one million users. Projects like Apache have made it really popular and considered as a viable alternative in the business world. However the term
free software didn't sound corporate enough. People are not very likely to invest in a solution because it is
morally decent. So lead actors of the community (Eric S Raymond, Bruce Perens, Tim O'Reilly, ...) created the
Open Source Initiative and came up with the definition of
open source as a development methodology that produces better software because the users are involved in the evolution and development of the software. The most famous examples remain Linux, Apache web server, Firefox and Mozilla, ...
So to answer your question, Free software is different than Open Source in definition but every free software is an open source one.
And remember, free has nothing to do with the cost. For example, Mandriva (and Ubuntu) are available online for you to download. But also, this guy has the right to sell you a Mandriva DVD. This is a
big difference with Windows.