It wasn't just a gimmick either. Mapping workspaces on to a physical cube makes navigating between workspaces more intuitive and natural. It provides a useful spatial metaphor to latch onto.

Then there was this one screensaver that made the cube slowly rotate while all your windows from all the faces blew around like leaves in a gentle whirlwind in the middle.

I really really want to see this come back. Even back then it was never released to stable and I got it from a script that grabbed and compiled all the bleeding edge stuff. It worked for a few weeks and then an update somewhere broke it and I never saw it work again :(

the cube was straight up useful as a visual cue since you can animate it faster and still know what's going on - I find the slide more confusing at speed.

For the pro level you had to make the cube transparent so you could see it all the time.

I don't see why Apple couldn't introduce this to its desktop switching routine. The cube animation already exists for switching users. It would be nice to have the option when switching desktops.

Apple hates options of any kind. Their core ideology is "opinionated software". Meaning the software does things one single way, the way they intended, and it does that really well.

It sucks though if you really want things another way. Then you have to mess around with third-party addons that break every time there's a major upgrade. It's the main reason I moved back to KDE (and the OS being closed off more).

I would never choose to use Gnome for this reason because it does the same thing. But at least on FOSS we have many options available, to each their own!

That's just it. Apple would rather provide One True Way to do it. On Mac, cube = switch user, and slide = switch desktop.

Apple is about the minimum amount of features. It's approach is minimalistic to the extreme and that's also good.

It's more or less the same reason why I like Gnome's minimalistic approach.

I have ADHD and everything I DON'T need is an OS that distracts me. FFS, I'd work from a VT-100 (even though I'd prefer a 3278-2 or 3279) if that was possible.