Everything you wrote was true several years ago, but today it's no longer true. Eclipse is pretty stable now since it has OSGI under the hood. UX wise though it's still pretty crappy. I wouldn't be surprised if the new Android IDE is still Eclipse.
My last full-time experience with Eclipse was a year and a half ago, and it was worse than it has ever been. Plugins and package management are a nightmare, and that's a quagmire that you can't simply rewrite your way out of. Terrible plugin quality control has created an entire ecosystem of bad Eclipse UI/UX.
As to OSGI -- that has been the core of Eclipse for nearly a decade, and IMO also a big part of the problem. The promise of OSGI was to allow Eclipse to be treated as a radically-open MDI framework that you could write just any old software on -- not just IDEs, but gaming frameworks, spreadsheet editors, on and on. The reality is that the standards for Eclipse's OSGI "drop-in" architecture have not stabilized into a robust ecosystem, rather it has lead to wildly varying user experiences, odd menu/pane/window configurations that have little consistency from one plugin to the next and poor quality software across the board. I'd be very reluctant point to Eclipse as an example of OSGI's fulfilled promise.
Also -- not sure if you read the OP, but the new Android IDE is going to be IntelliJ, not Eclipse.
Ok then if you don't mind what did you experience and what plugins did you use? I'm curious because there may be a common thread. Right now I only use it on Mac or Windows. I've rarely used it on Linux.
I suspect you are suffering from stockholm syndrome. I program Java daily, understand what Eclipse is doing, and I cannot use it for more than a week without shouting at it as it crashes and burns. Perhaps this is a Mac OS X quirk, but I don't really care.
And UX wise it isn't just "crappy." It take some serious doing to be less intuitive and newbie-friendly than emacs.
> I suspect you are suffering from stockholm syndrome.
I don't think so. If that were the case, I would have switched to IDEA a long time ago. Going off topic, I don't really like Java very much either. Anyways so what plugins did you have installed and when did you last you use it? What did you use it for - web development or something else like Android development? So far no one has been willing to list which plugins they're using so I'm suspecting that people haven't actually used Eclipse in years.
