NextBSD returns to dollop Apple source on FreeBSD
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NextBSD returns to dollop Apple source on FreeBSD
New maintainer revives the project with Darwin components, Gershwin, and Claude Code
Liam Proven
Liam<br>Proven
LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE REPORTER
Published<br>sat 18 Jul 2026 // 08:45 UTC
One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management. The Reg FOSS desk is intrigued.<br>Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository – but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due.<br>The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original – you can see his list of commits.
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The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 – its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD. Darwin is the Unix foundation on which macOS and Apple's other OSes are built: it's open source and the code can be pulled direct from GitHub. Some of the initial goals are explained in this presentation from the original team.
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The reasoning goes like this… Apple's various operating systems, from macOS to iOS to the cut-down ones in the Apple Watch and Apple TV, are all built from a single common core, derived from NeXTstep. That was built on Mach and BSD UNIX, which were Free Software – the term "open source" didn't exist yet. Apple's OSes are sophisticated, highly developed, and are used in billions of customer-facing devices with next to no technical support.<br>Today, much of Apple's OSes are open source. Along with the XNU kernel, which handles inter-process communication using Mach IPC, there's its init system launchd, IOkit for handling devices and drivers, the Apple System Log facility and its logging daemon syslogd, and much more.<br>Although Apple shares much of the BSD-based text-mode parts of its OS, the lower-level parts – the XNU kernel and drivers – are designed and built purely for Apple hardware. When OS X was still quite new, there were various efforts to take the Darwin OS and build versions for PC hardware. OpenDarwin started in 2002, but ended in 2006. It was followed by PureDarwin, which put out releases in 2015 and 2019, and was still maintained as recently as 2024. There were others, including GNU Darwin and DarwinBSD.<br>Just how difficult it is to make this all work is demonstrated by the way that all these projects ultimately faltered or ended. So the NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code.<br>The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal.<br>In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well. Naturally enough, it's Maloney's own Gershwin, and the current status is described in the gershwin-on-nextbsd repository.<br>For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD – both the original version and NextBSD-redux – is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole.<br>The inspiration it shares with Maloney's Gershwin desktop is clear. Gershwin combines components taken from the GNUstep Project, plus the window manager from the Xfce desktop, plus other components, aiming to create a broadly Mac-like desktop environment.
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Outside of the efforts to create a FOSS PC OS based on Apple Darwin, or a Mac-like desktop environment, there have been several other efforts to create a macOS-like OS from existing FOSS parts. What's encouraging is that many of them share code with one another.<br>Gershwin on GhostBSD was not the first effort to put a macOS-like desktop on a BSD OS. In 2023, we reported on helloSystem 0.8. It was the second look at this prototype OS in The Register after an earlier article in 2021. helloSystem was being put together by Simon "ProbonoPD" Peter, the creator of the AppImage cross-distro packaging format. helloSystem was...