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# NixBSD: This Project Mixes FreeBSD and NixOS in One!
- URL: https://itsfoss.com/news/nixbsd/
- Published: 2024-03-05T11:01:40.000Z
- Updated: 2024-03-05T11:02:19.000Z
- Description: Wait, what? Two good things in one? What do you mean? Take a look here.
- Author: Sourav Rudra
- Tags: Distribution Releases, News, #Import 2025-11-08 21:15

The awesomeness of open source never disappoints! Many from the community have teamed up to create something that will appeal to the *BSD* and *Nix* aficionados out there.

A new project called **NixBSD** has shown up that aims to combine the goodness of *FreeBSD* with the utilitarian nature of *NixOS*.

📋

It is not an official collaborative project between NixOS and FreeBSD.

For those unfamiliar, [*FreeBSD*](https://www.freebsd.org/?ref=itsfoss.com) is a Unix-like operating system based on [*BSD*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley%5FSoftware%5FDistribution?ref=itsfoss.com) that supports a wide variety of hardware configurations, and is preferred by many who like a hands-on approach.

Whereas, [*NixOS*](https://nixos.org/?ref=itsfoss.com) is an immutable Linux distribution based on the [*Nix*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix%5F%28package%5Fmanager%29?ref=itsfoss.com) package manager that features a highly modular approach to carrying out important tasks related to the operating system.

For a more detailed look into NixOS, I highly suggest you take a look at our [NixOS tutorial series](https://itsfoss.com/tag/nix-os/). Now, let's move on to see what the NixBSD project is all about.

## NixBSD: What to Expect?

For starters, NixBSD is what its developers call “**a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS**”, it will let users take advantage of all the benefits that the Nix package manager has to offer.

So, things like atomic upgrades/rollback, absence of dependency conflict issues, multi-user package management, etc. are now a possibility on BSD 😲

The developers also add that: 

> Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution.

If we go by the above, this project opens the door for other BSDs to implement Nix, and that is a great thing! 😃

At the time of writing, the NixBSD project has **three main repos**:

- **nix**, which is the fork of the [Nix](https://github.com/NixOS/nix?ref=itsfoss.com) package management system with modifications that allow it to run with FreeBSD.
- **nixpkgs**, the fork of [Nix Packages](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs?ref=itsfoss.com) that works with FreeBSD, it provides access to over 80,000 packages that can be installed using Nix.
- **NixBSD**, the main repository that acts as a stage for building variants of NixOS with the FreeBSD kernel.

All in all, this undertaking looks very promising, but, you will have to wait a bit for a proper distro release. 

## Want to check it out?

In its current form, **NixBSD is in its very early stages of development**, and cannot be considered for production or even general use. 

But, if you really want to try it out, or help by contributing to it, give its [GitHub repo](https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd?ref=itsfoss.com) a visit.

[NixBSD (GitHub)](https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd?ref=itsfoss.com)

You should find a very bare-bones setup with instructions on how to build it on a virtual machine on Linux. There's also a small section about how to contribute to the code of NixBSD.

**Suggested Read** 📖

[Getting Started With NixOS LinuxA tutorial series to help you get familiar with the immutable NixOS Linux distribution.![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/size/w256h256/2022/12/android-chrome-192x192.png)It's FOSS![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/2023/03/nix-os-tag.png)](https://itsfoss.com/tag/nix-os/)

*💬 It will be interesting to see how this progresses. Did you expect such a project to come out?*