I've now been using Kubuntu for almost a week and I thought I would write down some thoughts about the experience. I didn't get very far with my kdevelop experiment. It seemed ok, but there was too much stuff missing that I use in my normal workflow. So I reverted back to geany and aptana.
My complete experience with KDE has had it's ups and downs. I'm slowly starting to learn how to effectivly use the system. If you compare Kubuntu to Ubuntu/Unity there is a huge difference. Ubuntu is much more polished, it's not even i the same league. However KDE has it's advantages as well. It's a fair bit faster and more responsive, it allows for many times more configuration. It's much more of an old school Linux system, something you would never let your mother use (My mother uses Unity).
It's hard to say at this point if I will stick with KDE after the test, but at the moment it seems fine. Hopefully it will get easier as you learn the system. It took me three days to get the clock to show the right time, a problem I had on both my systems. I still haven't gotten my mobile usb modem to work on my laptop, something that works on the kubuntu livecd. Amarok keeps crashing on system startup. But I really appreciate that KDE tells me that it is Amarok that crashes, not Ubuntus generic "Something crashed" dialog.
At this point it seems a little like an uphill battle. Having said that, KDE atleast has a cause and consequence feel to it. The reason I swithed completely over to Linux in 2005 was that I was sick of fighting stupid problems in Windows. Linux might have had a few more problems, but they where logical and you could understand them, thus easier to fix. Lately Ubuntu/Unity has been stating to accumulate stupid problems, so I think I might prefer KDE:s more but logical problems. Although the clock problem was kinda stupid. (Installer configured tzdata incorrectly, was fixed by a dpkg-reconfigure tzdata.)
I'm still hopeful that KDE will be something I can stick with. I just wish that someone whould fix some of the more silly things in it. I should probably look into helping with that myself.