Ghostbsd 25.02 Adds ‘gershwin’ Desktop For A Mac Like Twist

The latest release of GhostBSD, an easy graphical FreeBSD distribution, includes a brand new macOS-like desktop environment, “Gershwin.”

GhostBSD 25.02-R14.3p2 appeared on Monday as the second release of 2025. The rather long and complicated version numbering system was explained in the announcement for 2025’s first release, which was 25.01-R14.2p1.

We last looked at GhostBSD a couple of years ago, and liked what we saw. This version is based on FreeBSD 14.3. It fixes some bugs, improves hardware handling (for instance, it works better with sound controllers that have more than two outputs), and enhances detection (especially for certain AMD and Nvidia cards). This version adds automatic /tmp directory clearing, updates Wi-Fi drivers, and fixes issues with several of its bundled apps.

GhostBSD’s default desktop is the pragmatic MATE and it comes with Firefox and some handy custom apps written for the distro

To try to express it in terms familiar to folks who know Linux, GhostBSD is essentially a distribution of FreeBSD. FreeBSD is in several ways the most established of the BSD family, but its installation process is rather cryptic and unfriendly, although the team is working on that.

GhostBSD takes the latest released version of the existing FreeBSD OS, and packages it with a bootable installation medium that loads to a graphical desktop and provides an easy graphical installer. It also adds some graphical setup and administration tools, such as a graphical OS-update app. Over in the Linux world, this is the sort of thing that users are accustomed to, but it’s quite radical stuff in the BSD world.

We tried it both in a VirtualBox VM and also on an old ThinkPad T420. It installed comfortably and ran smoothly on both, and on bare metal, it detected and worked with sound, Wi-Fi, and even a second DisplayPort monitor. It had no problems booting from ZFS on systems with a legacy BIOS. It was as quick and easy as we would expect of any Linux distro from the last decade, but for FreeBSD, this remains impressive.

The standard edition of GhostBSD uses the MATE desktop, but there’s also a community build that uses Xfce instead. The big new feature in this 25.02 release is an additional community edition with a whole new desktop, which is called Gershwin. This reuses an Apple codename from the mid-1990s, and that’s a hint. This Gershwin hopes to deliver a macOS-like experience.

Alternatively, there’s Gershwin, which combines parts of GNUstep and Xfce for a vaguely Mac-like desktop

As its GitHub project page shows, Gershwin is a separate project. In one of the GitHub discussions, project lead Joe “Pkgdemon” Maloney says:

Gershwin uses components and technology from several existing projects. The file manager, which also draws the desktop and the dock, is Gworkspace from the GNUstep project, which also provides the other backbone applications: Terminal, TextEdit, and Preferences. The web browser is Firefox, and the other apps are the main GhostBSD additions: Backup Station, Update Station, and Software Station, a simple graphical package manager.

However, the window manager and the desktop panel are provided by Xfce. This provides a Mac-style global menu bar that works with Gtk applications. To test it, we installed the MATE system monitor, and it put its menus in the top panel.

We like the idea of Gershwin. GNUstep provides a rich foundation and some highly functional apps. It’s usually used with the Window Maker window manager, and by default, between them, GNUstep and Window Maker provide a desktop that looks and works rather like the NeXTSTEP OS of Steve Jobs’s NeXT Computer. The Register rated the original NeXT Cube as one of the ten sexiest computers of all time, and The Reg FOSS desk is quite fond of the NeXT-style desktop. We’ve written about the demo showcase of Window Maker Live, and also about the GNUstep Desktop Environment.

The thing is that NeXTSTEP had a very unusual design. Scrollbars are on the left, and there are no menu bars; menus are arranged vertically at the top-left of the screen. NeXTSTEP is unfamiliar to almost anyone today, but then the first public version was shown in 1988. It predated both Windows 3.0 and OS/2 1.1 where Windows’s design originated. The last new computer with NeXTSTEP was Canon’s object.station, released in 1994.

GNUstep is usually used with Window Maker, which itself is also a bit strange by modern standards. There was an effort to make a more modern GNUstep-based desktop, called Étoilé, but it’s been dormant for over a decade. Instead, Gershwin uses off-the-shelf Xfce components, giving it a slightly more familiar layout – and crucially, one that works with non-GNUstep apps. Bringing in more standard components from other desktops is a simpler approach, one that might have the potential to do more with less work.

The global menu bar works with Gtk apps from MATE and Xfce too – but they don’t get Dock icons

We like the concept very much indeed, but at present it does feel like a pre-release demo. For example, most things don’t respond to right-clicks, and once a window has been closed, you must quit the app from the dock before reopening it.

The project seems very young. In the source code, the parts not inherited from the decades-old GNUstep project date to last month. We were interested to note that the discussions area has multiple posts by probonopd. He created HelloSystem, another FreeBSD-based macOS-like project The Reg first looked at in 2021 and most recently at version 0.8 in 2023. There haven’t been any new releases since, possibly because its underlying FreeBSD distro, FuryBSD, shut down in 2020.

Modern macOS is still based on the tools and technologies from NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep has already recreated a lot of that, even including the app packaging system. If Gershwin can find ways to modernize that, make it more Mac-like, and still interoperate smoothly with other FreeBSD and Linux apps, it could be on to something big. It’s also eminently portable back to Linux.

For now, though, we’d recommend the MATE or Xfce editions. They’re more complete and do more. Even if you intend to graduate to the “real thing,” GhostBSD will let newcomers learn their way around the subtly different command line, the restricted selection of shell text editors, the packaging tools, and so on. GhostBSD would not be our suggested first choice for total beginners with FOSS Unix-like OSes, but if you already know your way around Linux and fancy experimenting with FreeBSD, then GhostBSD is by far the easiest way to install FreeBSD and get it working. ®

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