[9] Plasma 5 includes a new default theme, "Breeze", and increased convergence across different devices.

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

[10][11] It improves support for HiDPI displays and ships a convergent 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.

[13] Support for NVIDIA proprietary driver for Plasma on Wayland was added in the 5.16 release (June 2019).