edit:
I've updated & expanded the list (finished for today)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
If you're just using it to declare packages and some configs then yeah you could definitely run like a post-install script or something on top of a minimal distro. I've done this for a while when i was using Void. It's get trickier though when you consider that nix can also lock your config at a specific version of all the software you have installed, which i don't think can easily be done on the average distro. There's also the rollbacks, though i suppose you could use btrfs for that, but i've never tried it.
with DNF you can specify a specific version I assume the same is true for other packages. Proper backup solutions should give the same A/B upgrade path that Nix and other immutable distros enjoy. I like nix I really do I just would like to have a reason to go through the painful learning process.