[5][6] Blackbox has specific design goals, and some functionality is provided only through other applications.

Blackbox has compliance with the Extended Window Manager Hints specification.

[9] The original author seems to have ceased updating the repository with the exception of a minor fix of compilation problems in 2015,[10] leaving the last original version at 0.70.1.

However an actively maintained fork by Brian Bidulock has been picked up by several Linux distributions in its place,[11][12][13] and it is featured in pkgsrc.

[14] Despite that, some other Linux distributions still use the original source code,[15][16] as does FreeBSD.