There was a wiki page set up before the big redesign of gnome-shell which revolved around the concept of a variant of gnome tailored for 10-foot form factors. Somewhere along the line discussion fizzled out and now that a lot of work has gone into building out infrastructure to gradually replace the wiki I thought it might be a good idea to continue the discussion/brainstorming here.
I have been thinking about this more since playing around with GNOME on the steamdeck and discovering how well it works, would be neat to be able to use GNOME on Raspberry Pi in place of AndroidTV.
Gnome’s redesign probably only needs some tweaking now.
In terms of shell itself, it would probably make sense to introduce a recents and favourites page which the user could use to view a global view of recently played/accessed files, kind of like zeitgeist activity journal but pulling in relevant artwork (album covers, movie/tv show artwork etc). This could also be a useful view for mobile/desktop.
HDMI-CEC support out of the box for interacting with GNOME with the remote of the display you have connected to.
Having content played on YouTube, Netflix etc show up in recents would be pretty cool too, maybe log mpris or is that a horrible hack.
If there is no support for hdmi-cec on the hardware you are using then support for air mice would be a good alternative, they might already be supported, it’s a long time since I used one but having them considered when it comes to navigating the shell might be worth it.
So why is any of this necessary? Why not just use Kodi/Jellyfin/Plex and be done with it?
Have tried all of the above but always end up having to context switch back to the os in order to launch an app anyway. Not needing to switch contexts at all when interacting with local/remote media library would be pretty cool.
Having something capable of running foss apps on a large display in living room would also be pretty neat. Right now Google doesn’t have very much competition in that space and what competition it has is usually proprietary.
DVB-I might be worth investigating also, there are several open reference implementations on GitHub along with interest from public service broadcasters e.g RTE in the Republic of Ireland.
Might be a potential avenue for future sovereign tech fund work, bringing public service broadcasts to where Europeans actually are instead of on proprietary platforms or inaccessible due to technical choices of state bodies.