For other people in this situation of running Nix the package manager on a non-Nix OS, a nascent Numtide project you may be interested in is system-manager: ht

For other people in this situation of running Nix the package manager on a non-Nix OS, a nascent Numtide project you may be interested in is system-manager: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/github-numtide-system-manager-manage-system-config-using-nix-on-any-distro/27064 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/github-numtide-system-manager-... The idea is to provide some of the NixOS whole-system management niceties (especially controlling systemd units) but on non-NixOS systems like Ubuntu, in a way that behaves more like puppet/chef/ansible rather than competing with the native package manager.