No major new or drastic changes, the new version of the Linux kernel was recently announced by Linus Torvalds. And, as Torvalds himself had already announced, this is a change much more than technological numerical.
Linux Kernel The last big change came in 2003 when version 2.6 was released, and since then has had 39 major updates (and other minors), with numbering based on 2.6.39. As part of celebrating 20 years of Linux (and even some difficulty in counting up to 40 Torvalds says he has ...) has the kernel to version 3.0. After all, what better way to celebrate two decades of a free operating system announcing a major shift in its core?
Since there is no drastic change in architecture or no new and surprising (apart from those few that are already expected, as bug fixes and compatibility with new devices), developers and users can rest assured: there is hardly any incompatibility with other software, and it requires no modification to the system or programs to use the 3.0 kernel.
If you are brave (or reckless) and not wait to have the new kernel running on your computer, you can download the latest version from kernel.org and compile manually. Otherwise, you can expect that the developers of your favorite distro to do the dirty work for you and put a package with the update. As always, expect can be a good alternative, unless you like spending hours watching the terminal processing lines and more lines of code.
