After removing the contents of ~/.indi it went a little farther.
It did NOT ask me if I wanted to keep a running indiserver
the indi control panel now had tabs for "WCS" and "Streaming"
closed the control panel and opened the CCD tab
under the Sequence Queue are three buttons: Capture a preview, framing, and live video
I don't know what "framing" does, but capture preview and live video fire a pop-up that says
"Connection to INDI host at localhost on port 7,624 lost. Server disconnected: -1"
ekos did not crash, but indi stopped. not sure if it crashed, there was no "backtrace" offered
Astrophotography is FUN!
ekosdebugger outputs attached: