I just installed latest-nixOS 24.11 using the graphical ISO, then popped open xterm and tried to follow the instructions in the README in this starter configuration repo.
I immediately discovered the latest version of nix included with the release is version 2.24. I spent at least two hours attempting to understand how to upgrade nix using different channels to no avail.
Am I missing something?? How do I upgrade nix?? Am I pursuing the wrong avenue?
TIA
Latest version of nix-the-package is 2.26. At the time of writing, NixOS 24.11 comes with 2.24.12 (source) which is, admittedly very close to 24.11, the NixOS release identifier.
There are some changes between 2.24 and 2.26 (see release announcements here) but they cover very specific use cases.
Are you sure you need to upgrade nix-the-package?
To add, the default version of nix in nixpkgs is a version generally considered “stable”[1] , and upgrading your nix version beyond the stable is risking breakages that you would not normally want to encounter on the stable nixos release.
Of course, this isn’t always perfect, as recently a broken version of nix was backported to nixos 24.11. ↩︎
I think I found another person that opened the same issue: nix flake clone fails on a remote flake with a dir parameter · Issue #12417 · NixOS/nix · GitHub.