I’ve been a huge fan of INDI and KStars since I started to play with an OTA mounted RPi in 2016. Things have improved immensely since those days and 2019 has been a truly exceptional year with six releases of KStars and the launch of the Raspberry Pi 4!

I’m immensely grateful to all the people that have poured efforts and huge commitments to this project. The increased visibility and adoption of the INDI platform in its open or embedded forms (both free and paid) is testimony of this great effort.

As our time under the stars is limited by a number of concurrent factors (weather, family & friends, health, work etc.) we all know how precious are those nights when we can dedicate ourselves to Astronomy. Especially for those of us who need to setup and teardown their equipment or need to drive to a dark sky location.

The necessity of being able to have a test environment and a production environment is very acute. Right now unfortunately I’m in a bit of a pickle because, among new features and platform changes, I’m finding increasingly difficult to isolate those INDI/KStars or OS versions that I can safely use in the field without being impaired by: bugs on new features, regression issues, driver issues, Rpi 4 specific issues and OS related issues. On the latter my problems are compounded because I run KStars on a client laptop: I have 3 laptops (Mac OS, Ubuntu Mate and Windows 10).

I’d like to hear from you on what solutions, configurations or software versions have you have adopted to make sure issues and bugs associated to this great wave of innovation do not affect your precious and limited time under the stars.

Thank you all and happy 2020!
Giorgio

I'm compiling myself, from git, and create normal (RPM) packages. So I always have the older versions available, and switching is a matter of (tens of) seconds. I usually compile the latest version during the day, and run it at night. If there is an issue I just downgrade to previous, and run the night. Then next day have a look at what the issue is/was. INDI (and PHD2) run on an ASUS PN40, KStars/EKOS on my Laptop (both Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed), connected via Gbit Ethernet.