airyxOS Aims To Build Upon FreeBSD With The "Finesse of macOS"

One of the promising new BSD projects started over the past year was helloSystem as "the macOS of BSDs" and built atop FreeBSD but with a macOS-inspired design. A Phoronix reader has pointed out another entrant in this field with airyxOS as a FreeBSD-based operating system designed to be similar to Apple's macOS experience.

The airyxOS operating system advertises itself as the "finesse of macOS" and the "freedom of FreeBSD." The developers describe this BSD OS in development since 2021 as "We love macOS, but we’re not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem. So we created airyxOS — an OS aimed to provide the finesse of macOS with the freedom of FreeBSD."

airyXOS

The airyxOS platform aspires to provide a clean design, global menu, consistent shortcuts, simple application installs, a faimilar folder layout to macOS, Cocoa APIs support, and the stability of FreeBSD. airyxOS also is focusing on Linux application support too thanks to FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility layer. The airyxOS desktop is currently based on the KDE 5 desktop with various customizations.

airyXOS

At the moment airyxOS is in an alpha/beta state. The developers initially recommend running it within a virtual machine or the hardware support should be equivalent to that of FreeBSD 12.2.

Downloads and more details on this project at AiryX.org.