For desalination all you need is a glass bowl and two metal bowls. You put the bigger metal bowl on the ground, the smaller metal bowl in the middle, and the glass bowl over the little bowl. The salt water evaporates from the little bowl and condenses down the glass bowl into the bigger bowl. You can run this setup pretty much forever, there's no moving parts and minimal maintenance. That's how simple desalination is. All solar desalination projects work on this principle.

The reason we don't use it is the same reason we don't do so many things: there is no immediate monetary cost to destroying the environment and using up common resources, so desalination is "expensive" compared to just using up the groundwater. Once all the groundwater is used up and the rivers run dry, desalination will be very competitive.