FreeBSD developer Joe Maloney announced the revival of NextBSD, a project that aims to integrate Apple's Darwin userland into FreeBSD's kernel. Maloney, who previously contributed to the Gershwin desktop for GhostBSD, took over the NextBSD project after requesting maintenance access from the original maintainers. The original NextBSD project was launched in 2015 by FreeBSD co‑founder Jordan Hubbard with the goal of porting parts of Apple's Darwin operating system to FreeBSD. Earlier efforts such as OpenDarwin (2002–2006) and PureDarwin (released 2015 and 2019, still maintained through 2024) attempted similar integrations but did not achieve widespread use. Maloney's reboot, referred to as NextBSD‑redux, does not use a fork of the decade‑old code. The repository's oldest commits are two months old, and Maloney has documented each development stage on his personal website. He said that AI tools, specifically Anthropic's Claude Code, assist his development by accelerating his understanding of existing code and by generating test suites. He also noted that he trusts human review of AI‑generated code in production environments. The project currently lacks a graphical desktop, but a Gershwin‑based interface is being developed in the gershwin‑on‑nextbsd repository. The README outlines the components that are functional, including kernel module loading and launchd integration. Maloney described the architecture as a clean‑room implementation, with some code borrowed from ravynOS's libxpc library. He has organized the code into separate repositories for the kernel, kext conversion tools, and Darwin‑derived utilities, and uses automated testing to verify each change. Other recent projects such as helloSystem and ravynOS have also sought to create macOS‑like environments on BSD bases, often reusing components from one another. Maloney's effort follows this trend but emphasizes a minimal approach that builds on FreeBSD's mature kernel rather than creating a new OS from scratch. The project remains in an experimental phase, and it is not yet clear whether a complete operating system can be delivered for laptop use.