This is a basic desktop cube effect for KWin. It's primarily intended to help you impress your friends with what one can do on "Linux."

Go to desktop effect settings, and enable the Cube effect. Once you've done that, the Cube effect can be activated by pressing Meta+C shortcut.

Note that you will need at least 3 virtual desktops in order to activate the effect.

Key navigation:

• Escape - quit the effect
• Left and Right arrow keys - rotate the cube left or right, respectively
• Enter/Space/Return - switch to the currently viewed desktop

Mouse navigation:

• LMB click - switch to the currently viewed desktop
• Press LMB and drag - rotate the cube
• Wheel up and down - move the cube farther or closer, respectively

Arch Linux:

For users who are using KF6/Plasma 6

yay -S kwin-effects-cube-git

For users who are using Plasma 5

yay -S kwin-effects-cube

You will need the following dependencies to build this effect:

• CMake
• any C++14 enabled compiler
• Qt
  • qtbase
  • qtdeclarative
  • qtquick3d
• libkwineffects
• KDE Frameworks 5:
  • Config
  • CoreAddons
  • Extra CMake Modules
  • GlobalAccel
  • WindowSystem

On Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S cmake extra-cmake-modules kwin qt5-quick3d

On Fedora

sudo dnf install cmake extra-cmake-modules kf5-kconfig-devel kf5-kcoreaddons-devel \
    kf5-kglobalaccel-devel kf5-ki18n-devel kf5-kwindowsystem-devel kf5-kxmlgui-devel \
    kwin-devel libepoxy-devel qt5-qtbase-devel

On Ubuntu

sudo apt install cmake extra-cmake-modules gettext kwin-dev libkf5config-dev \
    libkf5configwidgets-dev libkf5coreaddons-dev libkf5globalaccel-dev
    libkf5windowsystem-dev libkf5xmlgui-dev qtbase5-dev qtdeclarative5-dev

After you installed all the required dependencies, you can build the effect:

git clone https://github.com/zzag/kwin-effects-cube.git
cd kwin-effects-cube
cmake -B build -S . \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
cmake --build build --parallel
cmake --install build

Note that some distributions (e.g. Ubuntu or Fedora) don't package QtQuick 3D. If you use such a distro, you will have to build QtQuick 3D from source code.

Go to https://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/ and download qtquick3d source tarball (it's in submodules/ folder) for 5.15, unpack it and run the following commands

qmake qtquick3d.pro
make
make install