Plasma 6.8.1 Arrives With Fixes for Windows RDP Connections and Sleep

KDE released Plasma 6.8.1 on October 20, including a fix for connecting through the Windows Remote Desktop client. The update also tackles several smaller faults around remote-session cursors, display handling and putting a computer to sleep. It is the first bugfix release after Plasma 6.8.

This is a bugfix release for the Plasma 6.8 series. The release announcement describes a week's worth of fixes and translations after 6.8. It also warns that packages may not yet be available for every distribution. KDE publishing the release and a distribution offering it are separate steps.

Remote desktop gets several connected fixes

The complete changelog lists a KRDP correction for connection and authentication with the Windows mstsc client. Other KRDP changes address early failure with an empty custom user password, cursor images with red and blue channels swapped, and a TLS certificate that previously expired after one day.

Someone unable to connect from Windows should therefore look at the mstsc entry first. Someone whose connection works but whose pointer has the wrong colours has a different listed fix to check. The certificate change concerns generation of a certificate with a longer life, rather than either of those visible symptoms.

Match a desktop problem to its component

Several KWin entries concern sleep and displays: correcting suspend delays, turning screens off before suspend, and removing sleep inhibition when no outputs are connected. The compositor also changes how it accumulates cursor updates and avoids presenting a cursor when rendering has failed.

For multi-GPU machines, the list includes an NVIDIA host-memory workaround and the return of an AMD Cezanne DCC workaround. Those named cases are more specific than a claim that the update fixes every graphics problem. Record the GPU configuration when deciding whether a listed correction resembles the fault you see.

Discover has its own fix to prepare its update model before headless updates. That belongs to update handling, rather than remote desktop or display rendering. Keeping the components separate makes the long changelog easier to use.

Check the installed release before retesting

Use your distribution's supported update route and check the Plasma version it actually supplies. Our earlier Tumbleweed update report placed Plasma 6.8 Beta in staging at that time, illustrating why an upstream announcement cannot establish what an individual distribution has shipped today.

Once updated, restart the session if required and try the same remote client or suspend sequence again. Use the display layout and GPU setup that showed the problem before. If it still fails, include those details and the installed Plasma version in the report. That helps distinguish an unresolved fault from a machine which has not received this release yet.