The SUSE packaging of watchman ships a systemd service and socket unit that can be used for running a system wide per-user instance of watchman via systemd. To do so you need to execute the following commands as root: TARGETUSER=myuser systemctl enable watchman@${TARGETUSER}.socket systemctl enable watchman@${TARGETUSER}.service systemctl start watchman@${TARGETUSER}.socket After doing so any `watchman` invocations you perform as `$USER` should talk to the systemd controlled instance of watchman.