Greetings,
I recently read about something new for the BSD's called "SimpleDE". It is a desktop project aimed at OpenBSD intended to make it more suitable for use on a desktop. However, it is supposed to be suitable for other BSD's as well. I am pretty interested in something like this. Does anyone know any more about it?

Thanks

I'm not sure why you think that OpenBSD *isn't* suitable for desktop use. But it is, and has been for quite a long time.

The latest versions can run Gnome 3 just like any other OS. Before that Gnome2/Mate worked just fine.

With limited capabilities, until the OpenBSD guys have their replacements for some systemd stuff ready (currently in work) that is needed to have full Gnome 3 compatibility.

Anyways, you may want to look at this statement:http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=8489
So it may be that SimpleDE disappears as soon as Lumina can be compiled on OpenBSD.

No offense, but, OpenBSD is perfectly suited for desktop use as it is. I happily use XFCE and Fluxbox on OpenBSD 5.5.

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I can't find any useful info on simplede.

I have used this as found it to be a good distro. http://www.pcbsd.org/

Indeed! PC-BSD is a wonderful distro. PC-BSD is a modified version of FreeBSD that has a nifty graphical interface and a nice package manager. It is FreeBSD under the hood. I've used PC-BSD and it is very nice.

Every *BSD is suitable for Desktop use.
If you are a new user about BSD system, you can try PC-BSD.
I'm sure you will be happy

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I put together the SimpleDE project for OpenBSD. It was based on a similiar project in the FreeBSD forums.

Distrowatch labeled it as being an effort to make a more suitable desktop for OpenBSD but actually the effort was to use the available tools in OpenBSD to put together an easy to use desktop. There are no wrapper, cludges hacks for systemd, pulseaudio, hal, udev. It runs well on older systems/video cards and does not require compositing.

Doing away with the overhead for systemd, hal, udev results in a very light weight system that occupied < 80mb of system memory at idle. Since it does not poll menu items it is extremely responsive. The desktop was modeled after OS/X and in my opinion is very intuitive. For example, clicking the envelope icon in wbar starts a simple, easy to use email client.

There was also an attempt to educate the user about the configuration files and their locations, links to the FAQ documentation and how to use the man pages. Most of the configuration files were centralized which makes is possible to set up the same desktop in other distro's. I have set it up in Fedora 20, Debian Wheezy/Jessie and NetBSD.

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