The biggest change you'll notice is that there is a new, more robust update system. If you are running Candle 2.0.1 you can already experience it, as it will be used to upgrade your system to 2.0.2. It works by completely replacing the 'system partition', the part of the SD card that houses the Candle software, with a newer version. This is simpler, faster and more robust than the old method of updating each part of the system individually.

The biggest change you probably won't notice is that Candle now runs on a 64 bit version of Linux. This is more future proof, but more importantly, this change was necessary to enable support for Matter. Matter is a new smart home standard that is seeing wide spead internet adoption (and which we have mixed feelings about).

There are numerous smaller changes and improvements. A lot of the software has been updated to newer versions which will have support for years to come. For example, Candle now has both Node12 and Node18 installed. The controller itself runs on Node18, but it still allows older addons to run on Node12. Newer addons can run on node 18 if they prefer. The Zigbee2MQTT addon is the first to make use of this.

The Candle Store addon and its back-end have also seen upgraded to support the shift to 64 bit. It can now provide downloads for both 32bit and 64bit systems. The new Matter addon, for example, is only available on 64 bit systems.