Emre Sokullu on SimpleKDE

Interview with Emre Sokulla on SimpleKDE

"I would like to thank Emre Sokulla for his time and for the opportunity for this interview.
An with that lets get on with the show."
     - Amigaman2

"The main reason is that we find KDE too cluttered and too bloated; and we want something faster, more simplistic and easier to use. Honestly, I'm pretty happy with my own KDE installation, but I especially observe beginners having difficulty in adapting themselves to it. The results of TOSSAD (a European Union funded usability research project managed by some experts in Turkey) proves also what I claim in here."

"Our goal is to create a KDE based (which can be the best base in my opinion), enterprise level, simple, easy to use, secure desktop environment.So we want to make someting between Gnome and KDE. Some people consider our relationship with KDE, to the one between Gnome and Xfce.. But this is not true; we are not that far to KDE, we are forking KDE. By dropping some useless features, and thinking more on usability aspects, we can make an easier to use and more simplistic version of KDE. Our releases have longer release cycles than KDE; making the security patches and announcing them between the releases is our duty. This is to make SimpleKDE more enterprise ready, and more secure. "

"No, contrarily, we would be glad to see them using our product(s). Yes, GPL license of KDE forces us to release our codes under the same license, but we would happily do so, even if it wasn't. Plus, a commercial distro has already used SimpleKDE. Turkix sold SimpleKDE loaded Linux distributions to Turkey's leading laptop producer. But of course there's an important point in here; Turkix is another open source project of us :) "

"These days, I'm busy with writing a usability paper on a subject called Distractless Design Patterns (DDP). I'm sure, when finished, DDP will enlighten not just us, but all desktop environment developers, about some usability aspects. On the other hand, as you may see on our web site, we are creating some conceptual desktop environments for the future of desktop environments. Raleigh Desktop Environment (which exists on our web site under the Future section) was one of them. It contains lots of innovative ideas. However, it is not our interest or duty in SimpleKDE, to make this prototype a reality. But we share these ideas with other developers (for example we told about it on KDE mailing lists) and these concepts may add a value to the future of existing works. "

"Yes.. We have changed some of the KDE libraries; so in order to fully enjoy SimpleKDE, you need to use our libraries. But this does not mean that there's an incompatibility between the projects. KDE folks have officially contacted us, and wanted us to keep the compability. And we ensure everyone that SimpleKDE will remain fully compatible with KDE."

"An Indian distro is willing to use SimpleKDE on their desktop and we are communicating with them. We have seen that PC-BSD also considers using SimpleKDE as their standard desktop environment. We were thinking of using SimpleKDE on our own distro, Turkix; but unfortunately we didn't have the oppurtunity to make a public release yet. However, as I said before, we made and sold a commercial version of Turkix, loaded with SimpleKDE, to Turkey's leading laptop producer."

"KDE has officially contacted us to make SimpleKDE a sub-project of KDE. But this wasn't something like framework addition. This was to evaluate our usability efforts under the KDE Quality Project."

"It should work exactly like KDE. I don't know if KDE (and consequently SimpleKDE) works on other, smaller X servers; but personally, I used SimpleKDE on X.org 6.8.1 and Xfree86 4.4.0. And there was absolutely no problem as expected."

"As SimpleKDE is mostly a usability work, it doesn't have a direct, targeted effect on Linux gaming. However, it is a fact that dropping features, and making the system less bloated made our newly born desktop environment faster when compared to original KDE. As a result, we can say that those who use SimpleKDE (or especially let's say those who will use feature versions of SimpleKDE) may enjoy greater performance while playing games...".

"They should behave exactly as they do in KDE. Contrarily to KDE, we would like to have enabled accelerated graphics by default. However, it seems like this won't be possible for the next versions also; because although most of the desktop users have this feature, their graphics cards are not and will not be natively supported by vanilla linux kernel. Let's protest nVidia and ATI on this issue; they should somehow find a solution; they cannot ignore this community. I'm not sure but maybe we should agree with adding some binary-only drivers into the Linux kernel tree."