This is kind of a follow up to my own post from a few days ago.
Yesterday, my parents needed to watch a picture DVD and their DVD-Player was unable to handle the disc. I resurrected my old first-generation Centrino laptop and installed Ubuntu Hardy and Elisa. My parents really liked the simple UI and I’m sure they would like to use something similar for their other PC use cases: web browsing, email and word processing.
Now let’s assume GTK+/GNOME applications were flexible enough to seamlessly integrate into such a mediacenter-like environment (using some alternate, simplified GUI markup for example). We could easily build a mediacenter-desktop mix, which IMHO would please a lot of users (not the regular geek, but children and the older generation!). Such a product would be nice for devices like the Eee and perfect for those Wii-shaped mini-computers some companies have started selling recently.
Even if this mediacenter-desktop thing is just some stupid idea of myself, I really think GNOME needs to be able to better adapt to the needs of the future… and “the desktop” as we know it today will only be a (small?) part of that.