Supported Platforms¶

System Manager runs on Linux systems that use systemd for service management.

Tested Platforms¶

Platform	Status	Notes
Ubuntu 22.04+	Tested	Primary development platform
Ubuntu on WSL2	Tested	Windows Subsystem for Linux
NixOS	Tested	Works alongside existing NixOS configuration
Debian	Community	Should work; similar to Ubuntu
Fedora	Community	Should work; uses systemd
Arch Linux	Community	Should work; uses systemd

Requirements¶

Hardware¶

Disk Space: Minimum 12GB, recommended 16GB+
Memory: Sufficient for Nix builds (2GB+ recommended)

Software¶

Linux kernel: Any recent version with systemd support
Init system: systemd (required)
Nix: System-wide multi-user installation with flakes enabled

Platform detection¶

System Manager checks the platform at activation time using a pre-activation assertion that reads /etc/os-release. By default, it only allows activation on Ubuntu and NixOS.

Enabling other distributions¶

To allow System Manager to run on untested distributions, set the system-manager.allowAnyDistro option in your configuration:

{
  config = {
    system-manager.allowAnyDistro = true;
  };
}

This disables the OS check entirely. There is no option to selectively allow specific distributions; the check is either on (default, allowing only Ubuntu and NixOS) or off.

Limitations¶

Not Supported¶

Non-systemd systems: Systems using OpenRC, runit, or other init systems
macOS: System Manager is Linux-only
BSD: Not supported
Per-user Nix installations: System Manager requires system-wide Nix

Known Issues¶

SELinux may require additional configuration (see Troubleshooting)
Some NixOS-specific modules are not available on non-NixOS systems