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With the KDE 4.3 beta, plasma is able to use marble maps as a desktop. However, as with all maps it is a flat object. However, the KDE desktop is not necessarily a flat object. It can be a cube or even a sphere, turning it into a 3D object. This led me to an idea: mapping the entire globe onto the desktop sphere or cube.

This is simple enough for the desktop sphere: make the entire sphere a globe. Each desktop will show a different portion of the Earth. If you zoom out to sphere mode, you will have essentially a marble globe with your desktops drawn onto it. The top and bottom, normally cube caps, would instead by the poles. You could probably set it to slowly rotate independently of the desktops, so on each desktop the world will be seen to move underneath of it.

It becomes a bit more complicated with the cube. Basically in this scenario the world is broken up into 6 portions (4 along the sides and one top and bottom) and these are then mapped from a portion sphere into a rectangle or square and then placed on the appropriate surface of the cube. Basically it would be the opposite of what happens when your flat desktop is mapped onto a sphere for desktop sphere. This would of course lead to some distortion in the map, but that is unavoidable, and it should at least be less than the normal flat map projections because you are only mapping part of the sphere.