I'm slowly and somewhat painfully trying to figure out Linux. I purchased a media tablet and well its Linux based. Unlike Windows and MAC that come out with new OS every few years Linux does many many updates as they go along to their Linux Kernel. So when you do your updates its not huge one like Windows or MAC but more like a bunch of smaller ones. I kinda look at it like how Firefox is always coming out with a new verison, that is what Linux does.

Ok so the new version that is coming out Linux 2.6.30 has some new features , here are a few of them:

1. Fast boot. Older versions of Linux spend a lot of time scanning for hard drives and other storage devices and then partitions on each of them. This eats up a lot of milliseconds because it looks for them one at a time. With the 2.6.30 boot-up, however, instead of waiting for this to get done the rest of the kernel continues to boot-up. At the same time, the storage devices are being checked in parallel, two or more at a time, to further improve the system's boot speed.

2. Storage improvements. Speaking of storage devices, there's a long, laundry list of file system improvements. I won't go into most of those in detail. Suffice it to say that no matter what file system you use either locally or on a network, chances are that it's performance and stability has been improved. For a high-level view of these changes see the Linux Kernel Newbie 2.6.30 reference page.

3) Ext4 tuning. Linux's new Ext4 file system has been in the works for several years now. It's now being used in major Linux distributions like Ubuntu 9.04, and it's working well. That said, Ext4 has gotten numerous minor changes to improve its stability and performance.

4) Kernel Integrity Management. Linux is more secure than most other operating systems. Notice, though, that I say it's more secure. I don't say, and I'd be an idiot if I did, that it's completely secure. Nothing is in this world. The operating system took a big step forward in making it harder for any would be cracker to break it though with the introduction of Integrity Management.

5) Network file system caching. How do you speed up a hard drive, or anything else with a file system on it for that matter? You use a cache. Now, with the adoption of FS-Cache, you can use caching with networked file systems.

So you can read more about the Linux upgrades HERE