From the release notes:

We’ve had some big AdGuard Home updates in the past, but this one is to top them all. It’s been brewing for almost eight months! 🙀 So no wonder there’s heaps upon heaps of new features, improvements, bugfixes, and other changes. We’d better start listing them ASAP, or else we’ll be risking missing the New Year’s fireworks 🎆 🥂

Changelog is indeed impressive. AdGuard Home has been serving me as a local DNS for quite some time now. I initially chose it because it supported FreeBSD out of the box as opposed to Pi-hole. This release introduces support for OpenBSD as well, though tagged experimental for now.

$dnsrewrite rules and other DNS rewrites will now be applied even when protection is disabled (#1558)

Another popular demand. This change only makes sense, as DNS rewrites often carry a different purpose than simply blocking ads or trackers. You still can disable them by opening the admin panel, going to Settings → General settings, and removing the check mark from the Block domains using filters and hosts files box.

I think this one is the top feature for me in this release – it bit me way too many times when I turned off protection and all of my local rewrites got lost along with it. Overall – amazing release after several months of development, betas and RCs. Respect 🤜🏻🤛🏻