So I’m a few days late to the party. I’ve updated and have been gleefully using this the entire weekend (I don’t have a life).
From the email bag of Jurgen Fischer:
We are very pleased to announce the release of QGIS 2.4 'Chugiak'. The new release contains a lot of new features, tweaks and enhancements. The most noticible improvement is probably the long awaited multithreaded rendering, that lets QGIS leave a much more responsive impression. This is second release following our new four month release schedule that is meant to make new features and bugfixes available quicker and the development and new releases more predictable. This time the testing phase was especially fruitful and was therefore extended by a week. Thanks to all the tester for their time and good reports. The source code and binaries for Windows, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu are already available via the large download link on our home page: http://qgis.org. More packages will follow as soon as the package maintainers finish their work. Please revisit the page if your platform is not available yet.