NextBSD project revived: Apple's FOSS user-space tools on the FreeBSD kernel
12 points by lproven
12 points by lproven
This probably needs a vibecoding tag. The team is Joe Maloney + Claude https://nextbsd.org
I was about to be interested, but these days an overly slick website for a brand new project is almost always a tell. On the other hand, if a new project website looks more https://www.openbsd.org, I'm nearly always willing to look closer.
If it's still going a year from now, I'll be interested. While this is partially vibe coded, a lot of the work on this does go back years, so I'd imagine much of the vibe coding is focused on modernization and porting it to a newer FreeBSD base.
A lot of the macOS userspace is actually quite nice and well thought out (and plenty isn't). If vibe coding helps explore this space a bit more and bring some of those nice parts to FreeBSD, then more power to them. They're at least building on some solid foundations.
I've written about this on the Register -- I'm sure you all can find that. Includes a brief Q&A with author Joe Maloney, who built the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD.
I alway thought that the best thing about NeXT was their UI integration options and particularly the application services that could be called for object in the UI of other applications. The userland is the boring part to me.
It is and was, you're right, but pretty much none of that code was ever FOSS.
GNUstep recreated quite a lot of it, though... But isn't interested in creating a desktop environment.