Nix offers an alternative to the well-known container-based deployment flow, and can offer several benefits compared to those container-based deployments. However, it's not immediately obvious how you would use nix to deploy services on machines running Linux distributions other than the nix-native NixOS. To address this, we developed a tool called system-manager, which allows you to manage certain aspects of the system configuration of a Linux system using nix, while leaving others to be managed using the usual tools of the underlying distribution.