FAQ
The Project
What Lobotomy Project is?
The Lobotomy Project is a collective name for a number of different sub-project studied to build a complete computing system. Little more details on Lobotomy are available here.
Which sub-projects are involved in Lobotomy?
Too many to be here fully listed, too alien from canonical vision to be described in comprensible way. Give a look to the architecture design or to the glossary to locate different components and common concepts which glue them together.
Which design paradigm is applied to Lobotomy?
Anyone, and everyone. Currently the whole project is built upon a number of different concepts, someone collected while reading scientific papers, someone retrieved while listening at people suggestions and observations, someone stolen from existing marketable techologies found in geeks' news websites and someone totally new. "Common sense" and "inspiration" are the unique drive for the design of the system.
How do you had that strange idea to discard the desktop paradigm?
It is a looong story... If you have patience, read the full narration.
What kind of a name is "Lobotomy" for a project?
This also is explained in the full story.
Which is your final target?
At the current stage the first major milestone is a Linux distribution using the Lobotomy environment as unique interface, so to produce an usable operating system for general purpose tasks. However there is not a "final" goal: this is a research project, and it will procede until something new has to be experimented. A page of this wiki is dedicated to collect stravagant ideas about future possible developments from the basic concepts.
The Technicians
Which technologies are used in Lobotomy development?
A lot of common freesoftware products are used to build Lobotomy, from the FUSE kernel module for abstract filesystems to the D-Bus interprocess-comunications daemon. Particular attention is given to latest cutting-edge open technologies, so to test them and partecipate to the development.
Is Lobotomy a Semantic Desktop?
No, and the author don't like semantic desktop idea (but, to be precise, semantic technologies may works well). First of all this is not a desktop, second that kind of systems adds just a descriptive wrap around classical files instead of analize them and use their true informations, third in a semantic application most of the work is around tags assigned by the user. But we have to take note the user is lazy and rarely assigns tags correctly, or assign them at all; in Lobotomy the system don't trusts (or trusts just as strictly necessary) the user, and programmatical interactions depends almost exclusively on metadata automatically extracted, retrived and indexed by algorithmic heuristics.
How the project is released?
Due the will to produce something usefull for everyone, the complete project is free as in speech and as in beer, both designs and code: everybody can pick the whole archive at no charge or just a single component and reuse it in different context, under the term of the GPL license. Innovations cannot be exclusive. The code is written so that every single token can be easily isolated and reused outside the platform herself.
The Users
Who is the target public for this system?
Every domestic computer user with no special needs. Probably the Lobotomy system currently under development is not desiderable by professional users, due the radical cut from application-centric model and unability to run the preferred advanced programs used for personal businness. Anyway, before introduce Thoughts for those special tasks, the primary target is the mobile environment.
Will be so different to use than a classical desktop interface?
Yes. Really. Until you are conditioned by the common desktop interface. The whole interaction paradigm is changed, for example there is a single application which changes its presentation as required and no multiple graphical templates can be executed at the same time. Probably this may sound strange, but the Lobotomy Project aims to build something new, not a customization of something old.
