Last week, the third Plasma developers meeting was held in the Swiss Alps. 15 developers from 3 continents came to Randa, Canton Wallis to work on Plasma's code, design new ideas and concepts and to strengthen their bonds as a sub-community within KDE.

The latest series of the K Desktop Environment now utilizes Plasma, a new desktop and panel user interface tool that aims for a more functional, user-friendly, and sleek KDE desktop. Plasma also supports Dashboard-like widgets called plasmoids.If you want to further enhance the look of your KDE 4 desktop, I have here a list of some of the most beautiful Plasma themes available:

Over the last weekend, the Plasma team held their second meeting in Porto, Portugal... The purpose of Tokamak II was to design features and concepts to be worked on over the next year in Plasma and the KDE desktop.

KDE 4 features a new desktop shell named Plasma. Part of Plasma is support for desktop widgets, known as "Plasmoids", which can include a clock, a notepad and more.
Kubuntu users (and possibly other distros) have access to a package called extragear-plasma. This package, when installed, offers several additional Plasmoids, one of which is KDE Twitter.

KDE is pleased to announce that Plasma Next Beta 1 has been released. Plasma Next is the codename for the new version of our beautiful desktop workspace built on KDE Frameworks 5. It features the same familiar layout you will be used to but with a simplified and more slick look from the new KDE Visual Design Group. For the first time our desktop ships with its own font, the Oxygen Font.

The KDE Plasma team is inviting everyone to participate in a contest to create Plasma themes from which a select few will be chosen to be included as a part of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release. This is a great opportunity to contribute to a very visible component of the KDE project, the Plasma desktop.

The essence of Plasma revolves around two basic concepts: Plasmoids and Containments. Plasmoids are Applets, small applications that live on the desktop. Containments are applets as well, they act as container for Plasmoids. That's it. Really. On a default desktop, there are two main elements: the Panel and the desktop itself. Both are containments in the Plasma sense.

During the Plasma development Aaron Seigo mentioned that the final version of Plasma will allow it to the user to drag&drop Plasmoids between the “task bar” and the desktop. While the coding style for such applets was already available the actual implementation was still missing in Plasma’s task bar.

KDE keeps the desktop relevant and powerful as it doesn’t force an interface designed for phones or tablets on desktop users. KDE offers different GUI environments for different form factores. There is Plasma Desktop for desktop computers,Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and "Plasma Active" for smartphones and tablets. So a desktop or tablet user doesn’t have to make any compromise.