July 15, 2014. KDE proudly announces the immediate availability of Plasma 5.0,
providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and
familiar to the user. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE's
workspace offering. The new Breeze artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals
and improved readability. Central work-flows have been streamlined, while
well-known overarching interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5.0
improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to
switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under
the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics
stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and
Frameworks 5.

Major changes in this new version include:

* An updated and modernized, cleaner visual and interactive user experience

The new Breeze theme is a high-contrast, flat theme for the workspace. It is
available in light and dark variants. Simpler and more monochromatic
graphics assets and typography-centered layouts offer a clean and visually
clear user experience.

* Smoother graphics performance thanks to an updated graphics stack

Plasma's user interfaces are rendered on top of an OpenGL or OpenGL ES
scenegraph, offloading many of the computational-intensive rendering tasks.
This allows for higher framerates and smoother graphics display while
freeing up resources of the main system processor.