Early days - Linux for fun

I've been a Linux user since I started my computer science degree in 2003. However because all of my programming assignments in the first 2 years involved Java programming (apparently our university is dubbed "The School of Java studies" by a rival uni) there wasn't really any initiative for me to always use Linux at home. My opinion is that if all your programming involves an IDE such as Eclipse then there's no real gain in using Linux. So you see in the first years there wasn't much incentive to using Linux at home. The few of us that used Linux did so out of personal interest. Ok perhaps I am being a bit unfair, the lab machines at university did run Unix Solarix and Linux Red Hat so there might have been some motivation to also use Linux at home. But anyway there was no real need for it.
So anyway, in the first 2 years of my course I used Linux on and off. I used it for some basic C, C++ and Perl programming. And when I say basic I mean "Hello World" basic. At that time I was highly motivated to learn as much about programming and computer science in general as possible. Anyway I managed to master enough C++ to land an internship in my second year at Citrix working on the Symbian platform (needless to say I am very grateful for this priceless opportunity). However my internship didn't push me to use Linux either as all the development was done on the Windows platform (though the Symbian toolchain uses lots of GNU software, the SDK libraries are Windows DLLs grrr). Yet it is during that period that I really got started with Linux which not suprisingly, also coincided with my debut on the Internet. I should have maybe mentioned this before but probably my biggest obstacle to using Linux more was that I had no Internet connection from home! My original distro was Fedora which I got from the back of one of those Linux books. This meant that downloading a new Linux distro was troublesome (I basically had to ask a friend) and even when I had a new one it had to work out of the box because I couldn't download anything nor could I get any online help.... Of course my old Fedora installation couldn't support my new Atheros wireless card. I was hoping for a new distro that could work out of the box, hence giving me a platform for learning more.
So anyway while at Citrix I was working with other non-win32 Citrix Presentation server client teams so I was also somewhat exposed to the Linux guys. One of them in particular had loads of cds with Linux distros. He recommended me SuSE 9.3 which came on no less that 5 cds. I installed it and was pleasantly suprise to see that it recognised my wireless card out of the box. The KDE desktop also looked much better than anything I had seen before. So I guess this is really when my true exposure to Linux began. SuSE 9.3 with an Internet connection. That summer I had fun exploring and configuring Linux. I remember having lots of fun with Linux that summer, exploring other programming languages like Ada95 and Ruby, spending/wasting lots of time on IRC and just learning in general.
In my 3rd year of university I used Linux some more because we had some C courseworks in my OS course. However our group project, once again involved only Java so ended up booting into Windows mostly for practical reasons. After all we used Eclipse with built-in CVS and Ant so there wasn't any point in using Linux really (especially with KDE which was maybe just a tad faster than Windows to load up).
The summer of my 3rd year I decided I wouldn't look for a job but have fun and do my own thing. That's probably when I started really concentrating on my ideal Linux setup.