Support for other distros.

[rhbollinger1s]

This is a great project, however, I do not see Ubuntu desktop users using it. Perhaps add support for a community that try's new things, and has the knowledge to use this. Arch Linux is the obvious choice, but I could see Debian being easier to add. Ubuntu is based off of Debian

[zimbatm]

Thanks!

When it comes to new features, our work is mainly driven by what our customers are asking us to add. It turns out that Ubuntu is one of the main distros used on servers.

Of course we're happy to accept PRs with support for other distros.

[nikhilmaddirala]

Any idea what it would take to add Debian support? I'm assuming that's the least effort next distro to support.

[rhbollinger1s]

You could try building it from source on Debian. See what library's from ubuntu its missing, and backport them to debain?

[rhbollinger1s]

Linking and ubuntu libs are the only problems I can guess about. Linking is solved by compiling from source, and you can (mostly) put ubuntu packages on Debian with a touch of work. With a bit of work, maybe even other distros could work with this, but I can see more problems there. (Note: Ubuntu does name some packages differently than Debain, so you might have to deal with that?)

[nikhilmaddirala]

Cool, I'll give this a try! I'm actually interested in using this on Android 16 which has a native Debian VM.

[rhbollinger1s]

Install nix.
Add this:
{
config = {
system-manager.allowAnyDistro = true;
}
}

(Also, I might be dumb, I forgot that nix sandbox builds... linking should not be a problem...)

[jfroche]

Now that the overhead of running tests has been reduced with the help of nixos test on container, we are thinking to automate the test of more Linux distributions. We have started preparing that in #395.

As you mentioned, system-manager can work on other distributions with the system-manager.allowAnyDistro flag. As it is not tested and there are assumptions made in the code relying on Ubuntu concept, we can't guarantee that all features will work but feel free to create issue/PR related to that.