KRdp in Plasma 6.1

By ahiemstra, 25 June, 2024

It's been a while since I posted about KRdp. For those who missed it, KRdp implements a server that exposes a running Plasma session to be controlled by other machines through the RDP protocol.

The biggest news here is that KRdp is now part of Plasma and is being shipped along with the rest of Plasma 6.1. Originally we hoped to be able to include it for Plasma 6.0, but due to the amount of work getting everything else ready for Plasma 6.0 we decided to postpone inclusion to Plasma 6.1. This allowed us to include some fairly important changes that we wanted to include.

What's New

One of the most important changes to be included for Plasma 6.1 is that there is now a KCM in System Settings to configure Remote Desktop support:

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Remote Desktop KCM in System Settings
The new Remote Desktop page in System Settings.

This removes the need for setting things up manually and should make it a lot simpler to get started. This also adds support for logging in with multiple users. This work was mainly done by Akseli Lahtinen, who has been taking over more of the general development work for KRdp.

We also did a fair amount of work on the underlying libraries used for video encoding to improve encoding speed and reduce latency. This should mean that even with software encoding and a slow client, things should remain fairly responsive, even though video quality might suffer somewhat.

Virtual Session Support

One thing that is being asked somewhat often is whether KRdp would allow a remote user to login without a currently running session. Unfortunately, currently that is not supported and there is no clear roadmap for when it will be supported. Remote login requires quite some extra infrastructure to fully work, not only in Plasma but other projects as well.

If you feel this is an important use case for you and you have the ability to work on something like this, feel free to reach out to us to discuss things. Ultimately having someone who is passionate about a use case working on it will ensure things get developed a lot quicker. See the Get Involved page on the KDE Community wiki on how to get started. For KRdp specific questions, feel free to ask them in #plasma on Matrix.

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