I would always hear about how Linear was fast, but after actually working daily with it, I’ve lost enthusiasm. Search is quite slow, the UI is often clunky (looks good though), “Pulse” is a torrent of noise even at small scale, and I have trouble finding things I need and resort to adding everything to favorites.
Early days’ Trello was the best project tracking experience by far.
Whatever they did to market the product worked amazingly well, because I see it being suggested all the time even by people who haven’t used it! Their marketing has established it as the fast alternative, so every complaint about slow project management elicits a suggestion from someone to try Linear. Then you ask them about their own experience with Linear and either they haven’t used it or didn’t use it for more than a few hours on a side project.
I've used it for a couple of years now and honestly the hype around it is really unjustified. It does the job but it's nothing special. I could go back to Jira and see no change in productivity after a brief re-orientation period
The comparison to Jira is unfair, Jira is known for abysmal performance.
Linear was really, incredibly fast. We adopted it in 2021 and it was amazing.
Now it’s bloated. That’s the standard path for most software (Zawinski’s Law), and I’m not very excited when they ship another feature. Most of the new stuff isn’t for small players, they’re more of an alternative for medium and large businesses.
I think it depends on your job/role. Unless you're spending literally all day in Jira, I don't think the performance (or even more broadly, the enjoyment) of one's task tracker affects productivity that much.
Understandably, but PMs/POs usually want you to update the board, leave comments, tag things, and so on. Doing that speedily and with keyboard shortcuts in Linear is almost enjoyable.
I love when I try to pull up a ticket during a meeting or a huddle and then awkwardly watch it loading/caching or w/e its doing for an inordinate amount of time.
I tried linear demo and many other task tracker/issue trackers. Many of them were just that: "fine" but then wanted a large pricing increase for OIDC connectors or similar.
The core issue isn't hard so I built my own, native OIDC auth, status, comments, plus I made communication a first class citizen, tracked it its own status workflow. Another nice thing I like is that status has attached a workflow that associates actions with a status transitions and task screens are defined in data. All APIs go through a single endpoint that can be intrinsically combined into batches. Still fast. It isn't that great, but I like it so much better then any of these commercial offerings.
Linear is probably starting to hit enshittification territory. The feature bload is immense and they are trying extremely hard to not be left behind on the AI wave.
Early days’ Trello was the best project tracking experience by far.