Stellarium 0.21.2

[Nightspore]

 

 

Suitably emboldened by successfully upgrading the PPA version of Cartes du Ciel 4.2.1 on Linux I decided to have another stab at installing the PPA Stellarium. I ran Stellarium for over a decade on Microsoft Windows. I thought it was a wonderful program and the fact that it was freeware made it even better.

 

 

Several years ago the Stellarium development team changed its rendering engine. For some reason this affected the Windows BIOS clock by pushing it forwards a minute every time Stellarium was opened. Although, unlike Unix, Windows BIOS clocks are notoriously inaccurate anyway. Eventually I uninstalled Stellarium from Windows but carried on using it on Ubuntu.

 

 

I now only run Unix operating systems (Ubuntu, Chrome OS, macOS). Since upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS I had been running the Snap version of Stellarium 0.21.0. Snap packages contain a lot of necessary libraries and dependencies and can be updated without adding Personal Package Archives (PPA’s).

 

 

I can understand why Canonical introduced Snaps but they have disadvantages as well as advantages. One of the prime disadvantages is that you have to rely on the Snap developer to update a specific Snap package.

 

 

The developer of the Stellarium Snap has left it at 0.21.0. Stellarium is now at version 0.21.2 and I finally decided to install the PPA and the latest version directly from the Terminal (command line).

 

 

It seems fine so far and I’m pretty happy with it.