Has the obvious not occurred to you?

[DxrMorgan]

You have a table of devices, and you can't change anything except tags and the host. Do you even understand that when someone has, say, 100 machines, how are they supposed to figure out which machine it is in all this mess? Why couldn't you have created a text field where you could add your notes? This is obvious, something you should have done from the start. Or do you think 00-54-41-53-34 is easy to remember?

[gustavosbarreto]

If you think this is obvious, then define it.
Do you really consider manually maintaining free-text notes for hundreds or thousands of devices a practical solution?

What exactly would you expect from a notes field at that scale?
How would you use it in practice, and how would it differ from tags or structured metadata?

[DxrMorgan]

If you think this is obvious, then define it. Do you really consider manually maintaining free-text notes for hundreds or thousands of devices a practical solution?

What exactly would you expect from a notes field at that scale? How would you use it in practice, and how would it differ from tags or structured metadata?

There's no need to talk about hundreds of thousands, as we understand perfectly well that most people don't use that many. So, scaring people with numbers is a must. And secondly, even with 100,000 entries, you need a text description, and it doesn't matter whether you have 10 or 100,000. Otherwise, you'll be able to figure out 10 entries, but with 100,000, as you write, you'll get tired of chewing dust.

[DxrMorgan]

Overall, the idea is simply brilliant. But the functionality is meager. Every system restart forces a Let's encrypt refresh, and that's bad! The next time, HTTPS won't even start. Session recording isn't always necessary, especially when there's just 00-43-42-43 and it's hard to figure out what session it is. Previously, you could click on the hostname in the table to get to the detailed view, but now you have to click the button on the left, select detailed, and only then can you access it. The program's ergonomics are simply terrible. The table display selection isn't remembered; you have to switch from 10 to 50 every time. And you have to click outside the field with the mouse for the change to take effect. Compared to version 9, version 21 is worse. Hire a good systems analyst!

[gustavosbarreto]

This discussion currently mixes multiple unrelated topics, including UX opinions, regressions, bugs, and feature requests, which makes it difficult to address each point properly.

If there are functional issues, such as HTTPS or Let’s Encrypt behavior, or startup problems, these should be reported as separate issues. That is the appropriate channel for concrete problems and allows them to be investigated and fixed efficiently.

Regarding device organization, free form text fields do not scale well in practice. Even with a few dozen devices they quickly become inconsistent, hard to search, and difficult to maintain.

We have customers running close to 40,000 devices in production environments, and none of them rely on manual text descriptions to organize their fleet. They use tags, which are designed for this purpose and provide structured, searchable, and scalable metadata. That said, any alternative approach would need to be clearly justified by concrete use cases, particularly in smaller fleet scenarios.

Concerns about hostnames are already addressed by the platform. ShellHub allows defining a human friendly device name through the PREFERRED_HOSTNAME configuration, which is documented and already addresses this concern without requiring users to memorize identifiers.

As for table behavior and navigation, we acknowledge that some UX regressions were introduced during recent refactorings of the datatable component. These are known issues, and most of them are already addressed to be fixed in the next release.

[DxrMorgan]

In any case, you're great, it's a really cool project. It's very user-friendly, but I'd like a couple of tweaks. Keep up the good work! And don't be offended if I said something wrong.