Both have their origin in Europe. openSUSE has its origins in Germany, that’s why it is still very popular there. Mandrake had its roots im France.

openSUSE is one of the old desktop oriented distros. I find it somehow similar to the old glorious Mandrake (r.i.p.). Like it it’s a European distro and both of them are relatively KDE centric and so also somehow similar to Windows. So the philosophy behind both of them is to be user friendly in the way you can do relatively much with the central configuration panel.