Dear community,
Two years have passed since our last major release, openHAB 4.0, and today I am thrilled to announce the release of our next major version: openHAB 5.0 is here 
Over a hundred contributors have worked tirelessly, contributing approximately 2,500 commits and nearly a million lines of new code. This makes openHAB 5.0 an outstanding release packed with a ton of new features. A thousand thanks to all contributors and users for your hard work and dedication!
openHAB 5.0 introduces Matter support, enabling the seamless integration of Matter devices into openHAB. It also allows openHAB Items to be exposed to third-party Matter clients like Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant—all without needing cloud connectivity.
But that’s not all: we’ve added Python Scripting and YAML configuration, revamped the semantic model experience, implemented drag-and-drop functionality in various parts of our Main UI, introduced 20 new add-ons, and upgraded to the latest dependencies. Check out the release notes to learn about all the changes.
Be sure to read our release blog post to get the big picture of these changes. As the coordinator of this joint effort, I highly recommend reading it. The release blog post guides you through many new features and provides a great overview.
As usual for a major release, there are some breaking changes:
The required minimal Java version has been updated from Java 17 to Java 21. Make sure you have a suitable JVM installed. This change effectively drops support for 32-bit ARM OSes. More information about how this affects openHABian can be found in the release notes.
Please pay close attention to the breaking changes section before upgrading to openHAB 5.0 to avoid any surprises.
Please use this topic for discussions around this release and feel encouraged to give us your feedback.
Best regards,
Florian