The difference between “Desktop Plane” and “Desktop Wall” in the Ubuntu “Visual Effects” options (aka CompizConfig Settings) is that the latter allows windows to overlap a viewport* and the former does not. (Along with this comes a lot of incidental options and visual fillips, like the ability to drag a window entirely from one viewport to another.) Although this does not sound like a big productivity booster, I’m going to give the Wall a chance.
I’m not going to give the “Desktop Cube” a chance, because it won’t let me place viewports above and below, as well as left and right, seemingly out of some wrong-headed sense of pseudo-three-dimensional literalism (although your “cube” can have an arbitrary number of faces, they must be arranged linearly from left to right: Euclidian topologies only).
* For some reason the “Desktop Plane,” “Desktop Wall,” and “Desktop Cube” options all use viewports and not workspaces**, so they don’t work well with the Gnome Workspace Switcher.
** For some other reason, Gnome has two distinct ways of implementing virtual desktops (viewports and workspaces) even though theres no discernible advantage to one over the other (except for compatibility with this application or that).
[UPDATE] Visual Effects lead to intermittent system freezes. Fun! Going back to boring old workspaces.
Procrastiblog 