NixOS Tutorial - Upgrading to new releases

In this quick tutorial we will be upgrading NixOS from 23.11 to 24.05

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[james-cucumber]

Awesome video! Always super glad to see more NixOS videos!
Small bit of (hopefully constructive) criticism, there’s a lot of empty space in this video: waiting for you to type the right command, or for a command to run. I have no evidence to back this up, but I feel like watchtime is likely to improve if you reduce these gaps. You could speed up the video when commands are running and you’re not talking, and maybe use your shell’s history to get commands written a bit faster.

[RobFisherUK]

I normally use unstable without much issue (occasionally I have to hold back for a week until something is fixed or add some workaround override, mostly to do with logseq's use of electron).

But for a server I just set up I opted for stable 24.05. This video reassures me that the big upgrades are mostly straightforward.

[borscht]

Thanks. By the way I don't know why (because I'm a noob) but 'nixos-rebuild switch' doesn't work for me, I had to use 'sudo nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade' I know that 'sudo' gives administrator permissions but I don't understand why not using 'upgrade' worked for you but not for me.

[booombaaam]

The only reason why I'm not using nixos is because I'm on a metered connection.
In nixos you can't view how much data you need to spend before you start downloading the stuff like other linux package managers. And also if the data is not sufficient it's not like you can pause the download till there and continue the download from there next...

[matthewstott]

Just like that, it failed for me. Perhaps there is a kernel or Nvidia issue as Hyprland crashes after updating to 24.05 as well as 24.11 unstable. I was able to rollback to 23.11 without an issue (my favorite NixOS feature). I'll go review the release notes but I may just need to wait a few weeks for the issues to be resolved.