Platform Support 💻

[JosephTLyons]

Currently, Zed supports macOS, Linux and Windows. Support for other platforms is planned and listed on our public roadmap.

See also: Zed System Requirements for more.

Original placeholder issues tracking upvotes:

• Web support #26195
• FreeBSD support #15309

[aminya]

I tried to run Zed inside a Catalina VM because I don't use a Mac, however it failed. That's unfortunate, as I really wanted to test Zed.

First, I could not run it from the image file itself. After realizing that I needed to move it to the Application folder, I reran it multiple times, but it failed to run without showing any message.

Then, by running it from the terminal I could get an error message:

Error gpui::platform::mac::window] Unable to access a compatible graphics device

I installed the VM using Sosumi snap on Kubuntu 22.04.

This seems similar to
https://github.com/zed-industries/feedback/issues/272

[iamnbutler]

I tried to run Zed inside a Catalina VM because I don't use a Mac, however it failed. That's unfortunate, as I really wanted to test Zed.

First, I could not run it from the image file itself. After realizing that I needed to move it to the Application folder, I reran it multiple times, but it failed to run without showing any message.

Then, by running it from the terminal I could get an error message:

Error gpui::platform::mac::window] Unable to access a compatible graphics device

I installed the VM using Sosumi snap on Kubuntu 22.04.

This seems similar to #5571

Yeah unfortunately you won't be able to run Zed in a VM. We added that message as previously zed would try to open and immediately panic. I don't remember where, but someone tried this before and had an issue for it.

One of the other team members will need to speak to the technical side, but I think it has something to do with Metal.

[maxbrunsfeld]

Yeah, when running macOS on a VM, we don't have the GPU access that we currently depend on for rendering.

[iamnbutler]

Reposting my discord response about platform support here:

Hey y'all – We are excited that you all are excited to try Zed. Just want to make sure expectations are in check – We plan to release on multiple platforms for 1.0, but work on these has not even begun yet.

We're focusing on getting the editor into a good place on one platform first, then will direct attention to making it more widely available. We do have some team members hacking on experimental implementations on other platforms, but they are not official currently and have no expected date they will be testable.

We want to make sure that expectations are clear – We know y'all are dying to try Zed out on the platforms you love the most. I try to pop in when I can to make sure expectations are in check, but I've been a bit heads down recently.

From our faq (https://zed.dev/faq):

We're focusing on a single platform for now because we're a small team. At our current scale, maintaining additional platforms would represent a big cost without much additional learning. We plan to support Linux and Windows before 1.0, and to support a web version some time after that.

There is a tracking issue for platform support that you can follow along with here: https://github.com/zed-industries/feedback/issues/174 (this issue)