Requirements and the substrate
The appliance needs only a machine to boot it — it brings its own Incus. The bolt-on needs a running Incus you point kixctl at. Neither asks you to adopt NixOS.
Installing kixctl
Two ways to run kixctl today — boot the appliance image on any hypervisor, or bolt the control plane onto an Incus cluster you already run.
Your first deploy
Take an application from a git push to a live revision, then update it and roll it back — the immutable lifecycle, seen once end to end.