Window manager and desktop environment for touchscreens

I asked a similar question once. It is definitely a good idea if you find yourself ignoring the miscellaneous tools and features that come with the desktop environment.

The solution is, you don't need to install a desktop environment (or anything you don't use), just a window manager of your choice. I (also) asked another question about lightweight window managers. The summary is, if you want lots of effects go Compiz, otherwise choose a lightweight one like dwm.

Regarding Nautilus, do you really need it or some of it features? If not then you should probably switch to something else, maybe Thunar.

Definitely you should try xbmc. It is what boxee was forked from. Its plugins allow you to do quite a lot, including for instance watching youtube.

To use a normal desktop from afar, you can increase the DPI setting of your wm (Gnome), but the best way I guess would be decreasing resolution. If you'd then like to watch videos from your filesystem, one way could be to have a second X server running, with xbmc only. Then you could easily switch between them using <Alt>+<Ctrl>+Fn key combinations. Another plus of that is that no popups from your running desktop would appear while watching video.

Once you have xbmc installed, to run it in a new X server, do the following:

• switch to console with <Alt>+<Ctrl>+F1 (or ...F2 etc.)
• log in and issue

  startx $(which xbmc) -- :1