General question , is there an appetite to separate fleet desktop from orbit, as someone using vanilla Osquery the proposition off of vanilla osquery to orbit is that of low value high risk due to having to change established process and workflows and potential lack of feature compatibility ( custom extensions etc.) Versus that of deploying an standalone package in fleet desktop which does not contain launcher.

Hey Gavin, just to clear things up, Orbit is completely separate from Launcher. You use Orbit to deploy (and update, if you leave updates enabled) both osquery and Fleet Desktop.

Sorry I meant orbit and desktop , launcher is a typo

Ah, so Orbit coordinates the authentication between Fleet Desktop and the Fleet server (by sharing information with vanilla osquery). We've heard other folks request similar, so we will consider if there is some way to make this authentication work without Orbit.

potential lack of feature compatibility ( custom extensions etc.)

It is possible to deploy osquery extensions with Orbit today, it’s just not supported out of the box.

What about custom tables ?

Custom tables are supported. That being said, this feature is not well documented. I’ll bring improving the docs back to the Fleet team. If this is prioritized we’ll update you in this thread :)