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Keeping your Raspberry Pi Up to Date

TL;DR: Run these two commands to keep your Pi up to date (for Debian/Raspbian derivatives):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Keeping the software on your Raspberry Pi updated to the current versions is very important. This will help protect your from security vulnerabilities and keep the Pi running better in general. It seems every week developers are finding security holes in well-known programs, some even revealing weaknesses that have been present for months or years. OSS (open source software) developers also strive to improve program efficiency and make things work better and faster with new versions. So it will benefit you to run the update commands shown above on a regular basis for your Raspberry Pi.

I run them every weekend as part of my data backup routine. After running them, you might want to reboot your Raspberry Pi, especially if you see that a new Linux kernel has been installed.