[ansible]

Users would have to install NixOs (or GuixOs) as the base operating system, there is no getting around that.

But, after that, it seems to solve many of the versioning and dependency issues.

[BlueZeniX]

Not necessarily: nix the package manager runs fine on other distros, as well as FreeBSD, OSX, Windows, SmartOS, ...

Nix doesn't need fancy filesystem shenanigans to do its job: build isolated packages with complete runtime dependencies.

NixOS is built on top of it to provide atomic system-wide upgrades and rollbacks.