KDE Plasma 5
KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new default theme, known as "Breeze", as well as increased convergence across different devices. The graphical interface was fully migrated to QML, which uses OpenGL for hardware acceleration, which resulted in better performance and reduced power consumption. Plasma Mobile is a Plasma 5 variant for Linux-based smartphones. Overview. Software architecture. KDE Plasma 5 is  built using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5, predominantly plasma-framework. It improves support for HiDPI displays and ships a convergable graphical shell, which can adjust itself according to the device in use. 5.0 also includes a new default theme, dubbed Breeze. Qt 5's QtQuick 2 uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL(ES) scene graph (canvas) to compose and render graphics on the screen, which allows for the offloading of computationally expensive graphics rendering tasks onto the GPU, freeing up resources on the system's main CPU. Windowing systems. KDE Plasma 5 uses the X Window System and Wayland. Support for  Wayland was prepared in the compositor and planned for a later release. It was made initially available in the 5.4 release. Stable support for a basic Wayland session was provided in the 5.5 release (December 2015). Support for NVIDIA proprietary driver for Plasma on Wayland was added in the 5.16 release (June 2019). Development. Since the split of the KDE Software Compilation into KDE Plasma, KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications, each subproject can develop at its own pace. KDE Plasma 5 is on its own release schedule, with feature releases every four months, and bugfix releases in the intervening months . Workspaces. The latest Plasma 5 features the following workspaces: Linux distributions using Plasma. Plasma 5 is a default desktop environment (or one of the defaults) on Linux distributions, such as: History. The first Technology Preview of Plasma 5 (at that time called "Plasma 2") was released on 13 December 2013. On 15 July 2014, the first release version Plasma 5.0 saw the light of day. In spring 2015, Plasma 5 replaced Plasma 4 in many popular distributions, such as Fedora 22, Kubuntu 15.04, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Releases. Feature releases are released every four months (up to 5.8 every three months ) and bugfix releases in the intervening months. Following version 5.8 LTS KDE plans to support each new LTS version for 18 months with bug fixes, while new regular releases will see feature improvements.