NextBSD, a project that ports components of Apple's open-source Darwin operating system onto the FreeBSD kernel, has been revived after years of dormancy. The new effort, dubbed NextBSD-redux, is led by Joe Maloney (GitHub handle pkgdemon), who previously built the Gershwin desktop environment for GhostBSD and had a minor role in the original NextBSD project before asking to take it over.

The original NextBSD was launched in 2015 by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard, aiming to combine FreeBSD's kernel with userland components from Apple's Darwin, such as the XNU kernel's IPC layer, launchd, IOKit and the Apple System Log daemon, rather than building a new OS from scratch. Earlier similar attempts, including OpenDarwin, PureDarwin, GNU Darwin and DarwinBSD, all eventually stalled, underlining the difficulty of the task. NextBSD-redux is a fresh codebase rather than a fork of the decade-old original, reflecting how much FreeBSD and Darwin have since evolved, and it currently lacks a graphical desktop, though Maloney's Gershwin interface is being ported in a companion project.