Rethinking the desktop with reference to Apple's early UI guidelines Tim Anderson Fri 12 Feb 2021 // 10:29 UTC Share Copy Updated A pre-alpha project to make a new FreeBSD-based desktop operating system has adopted a minimalist design intended to appeal to Mac defectors. FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system first released in 1993 based on the Berkeley Software Distribution. The core of Apple's macOS, called Darwin, uses some code from FreeBSD. Despite its high quality, running FreeBSD as a desktop operating system has some challenges, mainly because it is less well supported by third-party vendors than Linux, which in turn is not as well supported as Windows.