"Even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking glass."
-- Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Hall of Mirrors"
Well, if that's so, Sun should probably take a second look at their new 3D desktop,
Looking Glass. As they even provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu, getting the stuff installed was a quite easy journey. But unfortunately, the target wasn't really worth it -- Looking Glass is not really ready for prime time (i.e., daily usage), it's more a technology study. Sometimes it's the details that make the difference, e.g. blurry background and fonts, missing keyboard shortcuts to switch between virtual desktops etc. But this time, it's not only the details: I didn't manage to get the 3d file manager to display correctly (i.e. in front) after moving it out of the way, for instance, and I got a hanging desktop altogether very quickly (after about five minutes usage). Most of the apps that you'll get with Looking Glass were non-functional either. Looking Glass is also really slow, even Gnome or KDE are light-weight by comparison. I'll have a second look next year. Or make that 2008.
