I thought that I would write down my experiences with Eclipse. I'm trying it out, as I thought that I might inflict it on my students sometime in the future. I'm a long time Emacs JDEE user; although it may recover at the moment, it hasn't kept up.
Eclipse has workspaces. Personally I hate these. Often I want to just edit a few files and have done with it. Emacs does this par excellence. Eclipse makes life heavy weather. It really needs an "open this file and guess the rest" option. Still, workspaces and projects are a lot, lot lighter than they used to be.
It was no subversion support out of the box. I decided to try to add a plugin. I found Eclipse Plugin Central, but there are no instructions on how to use this. Subversive looked a cute plugin, but requires adding about four different package repositories and doesn't work on linux anyway (I should say, I couldn't get it too work anyway).
Subclipse only required 1 repository, which is good, but still it's a far cry from the "everything you could ever want in multiverse" which you get from Ubuntu or debian.
The update manager is also seriously bugged. If I configure things wrong, on trying to update the manager just hangs. This turns out to be a proxy problem (irritating this, as I am supposed to have the proxy sorted out) as configuring makes it all work. I think that the hang is actually a GUI — I've managed to get a dialog box to pop up, for selection of mirrors which is hidden underneath everything else.