Stephen Webb of Canonical has written about the company's latest project, Libertine. Libertine is their new project for allowing legacy X11-focused Debian packages to run on their next-gen converged desktop with Unity 8, Mir, and Snap packages.

Webb described Libertine as "a cunning way to install and use your existing deb packaged X11 applications on a read-only deb-free system running Mir."

Libertine is a container to which the Debian packages will be installed so they don't have to touch the real OS installation. The container is running a mininal Ubuntu build and there's a Mir client that proxies to this container with support for XMir for being able to display native X11 games.programs. Libertine also contains proxy support for terminal applications.

More details on Ubuntu's Libertine can be found via this blog post by Stephen Webb.