Keeping your system up-to-date
A community effort such as Raspbian and the Debian distribution on which it is based is constantly being worked on and improved by hundreds of developers every day. All of them are trying hard to make the Pi run as smoothly as possible, support as many different peripherals as possible, and to squish any discovered software bugs.
All those improvements come to you in the form of package and firmware updates. To keep your Raspbian OS up to date, you need to know the following three commands:
sudo apt-get update: This fetches information about what packages have been updated.sudo apt-get dist-upgrade: This proceeds to install the updated packages. Select Yes when prompted for installation.sudo rpi-update: This upgrades to the latest firmware from the Raspberry Pi Foundation's GitHub repository (an online source code management service).
The firmware updates are more related to the Raspberry Pi hardware and may contain improvements to the Linux kernel, new drivers for USB gadgets, or system stability fixes.
