you must have a fast machine... Try installing windows 7 or snow leopard on a computer with 2gb of ram and a 2 year old processor... then the eye candy won't really add to the experience.
Windows 7 is running on my 1.6ghz Sempron w/ 1GB of ram. I turned off the major eye candy (aero) and it still looks great and runs fine.
That PC is the 'family' computer - so basically all it's used for is Surfing, streaming music through iTunes and instant messaging.
It used to run ubuntu but everyone complained about how ugly it is - and I wasn't going back to XP. At least with Win7 I'm in the clear anti-virus wise, no need for that.. yet.
hmm... I guess some people don't like brown. I would be happy if ubuntu came with a non-brown theme that had the same overall quality as the default theme.
I have always preferred Kubuntu to Ubuntu for desktop installs, and that's one big reason. (Also, I've always preferred Konqueror as a file browser to whatever Ubuntu uses by default with Gnome.)
However, it's been a while since I've used it (I have 10.4 and XP machines for the most part), and I get the feeling that Gnome has benefited from Ubuntu far more than KDE has from Kubuntu, being sort of a bastard stepchild at best.
KDE's Konqueror has features that I still find myself wishing for on my Mac on a daily basis. (E.g., the visual view-by-size thing and built-in sshfs are my top two.)
I've not seen any compelling reason to upgrade my Macs from 10.4, so when they finally hit EOL I may seriously reevaluate Kubuntu as my main desktop, see if it's kept up reasonably well versus the mainline Gnome version.
