Hi @za0 and thanks for your helpful feedback. I hope you don't mind me moving it into a new post.
I'll address each point you raised:
System stack
You know, you make an interesting point. There were two primary drivers behind the existing System stack presentation:
- I wanted it to be clear that any services in the system stack would be global (not per-stack) and any config would likewise affect all stacks.
- I expected the number of System services to grow beyond nginx and dnsmasq.
As things stand right now, there's no system service config possible. Additionally I am currently testing a build which deprecates our usage of dnsmasq, so that's likely to go, leaving just the nginx reverse proxy.
However, I do have ideas for the future which would conceptually fit there, and I do feel the current presentation does a good job clarifying that those services power every stack, not just one. That said, like you I have pondered how well it communicates visually what's going on. So I like your suggestion, where they sit underneath the services in every stack. I'll have to ponder this one 🙂
Adding sites
I totally agree, adding sites right now is poor UX 🙁 It became even more confusing when I added the sites list on the stack overview (the view where you can open the sites in your browsers).
My current thinking is I'd like to add a button to create sites directly from the stack overview, where it shows your existing sites (or the "no sites" message). Would that have resolved this issue for you?
Dnsmasq issues
Great find! As it happens I discovered exactly the exact same thing just a few days ago. The intention was absolutely to clean up /etc/resolver on quit, so it's a bug for sure. However, as mentioned above, I'm testing the idea of deprecating Dnsmasq altogether; there's too high a risk someone already runs something on port 53 — unlike other services we can't just use a different port. Also Apple themselves do funny things with port 53 in relation to their Apple Silicon virtualization framework, and we've had several people with DNS issues that I simply couldn't replicate nor resolve. The new build simply puts entries into /etc/hosts and that's working just fine so far.
Dock vs menubar
I think this would be pretty straightforward to accomplish, but I've prioritised it pretty low I guess, not least because I'm on a Macbook with a notch and am constantly annoyed by several of my menubar items being inaccessible!
MariaDB
Yes, it's definitely coming. I am kind of procrastinating on it because, like MySQL, I expect the Indigo implementation will be complex. There's quite a lot going on during the MySQL initial setup that's transparent to the end-user. Still, it's on my radar.