For those wondering what's new: “So what are the big changes? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is just about renumbering, we are very much not doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way…
It would break many of the programs which rely on 2.6.x naming scheme. Linus always was on the side of not breaking things if they do work. It seems that he changed his views for this particular case.
When Torvalds bumps the major version number with little warning, he signals that anything which depends on it always being '2.x.x' or, worse, '2.6.x', is not acceptable and will not be tolerated.
I've lived in both worlds. I prefer Linux. I'm not alone.