[11] They are bundled as the default environment with a number of free software operating systems, such as Chakra,[12] Kubuntu,[13] Mageia (DVD version),[14] openSUSE,[15] or TrueOS.

In KDE SC 4.3, it was replaced by the new "Air" theme, which predominates in transparency and white as the base color.

The scalable nature of the Plasma widgets allows for them to be resized and rotated to any size, with only a brief pause to redraw themselves.

The Kross scripting framework allows developers to write widgets in a variety of programming languages in addition to C++.

[20] It replaces the dialog box "Run Command" from K Desktop Environment 3, and also inherits from the application launcher feature, expanding the possibilities through a modular plug.

KRunner stores previously entered commands and searches, accessible via an auto-complete feature.

These functions are handled by the plugin: This is a list of widgets that the current release version of Plasma supports.

[29] Plasma 5 is the fifth generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems.

The graphical interface was fully migrated to QML, which uses OpenGL for hardware acceleration, which resulted in better performance and reduced power consumption.

[34] It improves support for HiDPI displays and ships a convergable graphical shell, which can adjust itself according to the device in use.

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.

[45] Replacing an earlier tablet prototype,[46] Contour has then become the main workspace UI of Plasma Active and was shipped as 1.0 in October 2011.

[48] Plasma Mobile was targeted at smartphones and small tablet devices that are mainly used via touch input.