Now I won't deny I'm not a sucker for eyecandy!
Since installing Ubuntu, I'd done alot of reading up about Linux, window managers and all sorts.  Ubuntu uses the GNOME windows manager (wm), and being upto speed on that, I decided to check out Kubuntu (Feisty Fawn 7.04), which is the KDE wm version of Ubuntu.  I also wanted to install Beryl, which has alot of funky windows effects (similar to Mac OSX), and I was intrigued having seen this video about Beryl on YouTube.

Having backed-up all my dev stuff from my Ubuntu installation, I proceeded to download the Kubuntu Live CD and install it in the Linux partition.  I then retrieved Beryl through Synaptic, and spent awhile configuring the myriad of effects etc.  It looked good, and the effects were neat. 

However.... there were a few problems:
Firstly, Beryl wasn't very stable.  Sometimes it wouldn't run correctly, and other times it crashed.  Sometimes it left the "shadows" of opened menus on the screen, which would then get in the way, and become annoying.  Secondly, I couldn't get into KDE in general.  I was used to using GNOME, and some of the GNOME apps I'd gotten used to either wouldn't work on KDE or didn't look the same.

I tried hard to make it work for me, but eventually I got a bit disillusioned by the issues, and decided that for a dev machine I didn't need the eyecandy anyway, so reverted back to Ubuntu Feisty, with good ole GNOME and all the things I came to love.

Oh well, can't win 'em all.  I'm glad I checked out Kubuntu and Beryl though.  I knew that over time more of those sweet eyecandy effects would be incorporated into Ubuntu anyway.