New to Java

I am relatively new with JAVA, came from embedded software domain mostly in C.
My interest is to learn and develop the GUI applications using Swing.
I am currently in a process of evaluating the IDEs, Eclipse and NetBeans on Linux desktop environment (SuSE 10.3).
My primary findings found that, NetBeans is better equipped with GUI development while Eclipse needs to have a plugin installed.

For GUI development, I found that few of my fellow Java developer friends have mixed feelings about these two wonderful IDEs, in summary here are the comments:

1) Developing GUI is better without any assistance from built in designers of IDEs (e.g. NetBeans or Visual Swing of Eclipse). Because, they put extra 'garbage" codes which are very much IDE specific.
2) GUI development in NetBeans is faster and more productive than Eclipse
3) Visual Swing for Eclipse is not a matured product and it is far inferior than NetBeans' capabaility

Now I ask a question, what is the best practice to adopt for starting the GUI development ? NetBeans or Eclispse or IDE-less development ?

Thanks.