Pinetab2 nixos-rebuild switch 'experimental Nix feature flakes is disabled'

I’ve tried reading a bunch and still having difficulty wrapping my head around flakes and no flakes.Currently I have a pinetab2 that I’ve flashed following these instructions

I flashed it to the internal eMMC using
sudo dd if=./result/sd-image/nixos-sd-image-*.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 iflag=direct oflag=direct bs=16M status=progress
The pinetab boots and I can log in, but if I run
nixos-rebuild switch

The following errors come up.
error: experimental Nix feature ‘flakes’ is disabled; add ‘–extra-experimental-features flakes’ to enable it

I’ve added no flakes and haven’t changed anything in the config that I’m aware of so I’m unsure how or why it’s getting this flake error. All of the tutorials I’ve looked at don’t work since I can’t get past this error.

Also I’ve tried generating a generic config using
sudo nixos-generate-config

But I’m still getting the flake errors.

This is probably something super simple and easy but after reading lots of pages I still can’t seem to find the right one to resolve this issue and starting building.

Also, I’ve tried this flake configuration and while it builds successfully, after a reboot there’s no graphical login and the firewall is turned on so I’m unable to troubleshoot it
https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pinetab2-nixos/raw/branch/main/flake.nix

Is there some way I can turn off flakes so I can work through the nixos tutorials? None of them work currently as I always run into that same flake error

Thanks

There’s probably an /etc/nixos/flake.nix file present. When there is such file, nixos-rebuild will prefer building from it as a flake (even if the flake experimental features are disabled!).

Remove or rename it and try again.

There isn’t any flake.nix file in /etc/nixos

Additionally, there isn’t any flake.nix file in the entire filesystem.