Linear.app

Karri (cofounder) from Linear here. Unfortunately we have been experiencing a DDoS attack the whole afternoon today, so the service is not optimal at the moment and the public website might be slow to load. We are actively blocking and mitigating the attack. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linearstatus.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linearstatus.com</a><p>Sidenote: While we had these issues, we decided to redirect our homepage to our website Figma file, where we shared iterations for the design and did a little community Q&amp;A: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;linear&#x2F;status&#x2F;1580723933837332480" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;linear&#x2F;status&#x2F;1580723933837332480</a>)

I have used Linear on a couple of my hobby projects and it&#x27;s a great tool to quickly capture features and bugs.<p>My one gripe about the new website (and it&#x27;s something I notice many projects stumble at) is that the written copy fails to explain what the product actually <i>is</i>. &quot;A better way to build products&quot;, &quot;the new standard for software development&quot;, &quot;a tool to remove barriers&quot; -- this tells me nothing, unlike a simple &quot;it&#x27;s an issue tracker bro&quot; would.

I&#x27;ve tried it recently, since it markets itself as being performant, and native-like performance is what other popular tools like Jira or Trello miss. I want to say upfront that 50ms user interactions is not what I would consider &quot;breathtakingly fast&quot; as the website claims. It&#x27;s much better than the tools mentioned above, but doesn&#x27;t really cut it for me. Maybe I&#x27;m old, but I see lots of unnecessary animations, that (in my opinion) contribute massively to the perceived slowness of basic interactions. Some of the animations are not that smooth at all, e.g. the new issue label menu color dots jiggle when menu animation finishes. I&#x27;m so tired of seeing marketing speak like &quot;UI elegance with world-class performance&quot; to then be only disappointed in the difference between my and the author&#x27;s views on what &quot;performance&quot; means.<p>Feature-wise Linear looks great though, so I might give it another try in some time.<p>P.S. Can someone please explain the hate for the pointer cursor? Why some products refuse to use it for links and buttons?<p>edit: I reread my comment and found it sounding a bit too critical. I really think that Linear is much better that most of the alternatives in the regard of UI&#x2F;performance. It&#x27;s just that I hate how the meaning of the word &quot;performance&quot; devalued with time and claims like &quot;50ms = breathtakingly fast&#x2F;world-class&quot; continue to contribute to that.

Can&#x27;t speak for other teams who may have advanced, complex workflows but we migrated from JIRA to Linear for our small team, and haven&#x27;t looked back. Just the simple fact that it feels like we can store <i>and reference</i> information from a ticket without spending 10 minutes waiting for it to load is a killer feature to me.

This post is without context, but I assume it is regarding the fact that Linear experienced (is experiencing?) a prolonged outage today and this particular link redirected to their new home page&#x27;s design in Figma, where you could see a chaotic cloud of cursors belonging to everyone else trying to file a ticket.

OK, we are firmware developers who use JIRA in a very advanced way with our clients, and we gave it a go and I just came back here to give the team some feedback because no doubt they are watching this very closely.<p>The killer missing feature for us is that we can&#x27;t define different issue types. For example, we would typically have issue types like &quot;Requirement&quot;, &quot;Bug&quot;, &quot;Signal&quot;, etc. with different icons and use child&#x2F;parent hierarchies to sort these in a tree with this hierarchy: L1 high-level business requirement, L2 technical breakdown stories, L3 very specific requirement&#x2F;bug&#x2F;signal.<p>In line with this, there&#x27;s no way to show the issue layout as an expandable tree-view (called &quot;List&quot; view in JIRA), and so our requirements tree would get all mashed up and flattened.<p>For each technical story&#x2F;signal we would have a custom field where we set the source file where we are implementing it. This would help us hammer out the architecture of projects very quickly and have them line-up with technical requirements. Doesn&#x27;t seem to be a way to add custom fields to different issue types. Later we would export this all out of JIRA to help write our documentation.<p>Lastly, a JIRA replacement without a corresponding Confluence replacement could be a bit of a point of friction. I hope that somewhere on your roadmap you plan to develop a basic solution to cater for the Confluence need.<p>Otherwise ... it looks nice. Have you thought about offering a self-hosted version, since JIRA no longer offers this?

For a small team, I can say Linear beats the hell out of JIRA.<p>I sure don&#x27;t miss the 30+ second page loads, slow pagelads, slow saves, slow edit button, confusing comments section, and accidental random ticket body erasure when working with a heavily loaded JIRA instance.

I spend all day in Linear and really love it! Thanks for your quick response to the ddos today, it was a nice opportunity to brew some coffee :)<p>I run a team that sits between Support and Engineering, bug reports from the highest tiers of support are written up as issues and submitted to our triage. We investigate the issues to find root causes, determine the parties best situated to resolve them, assess user impact, add appropriate labels, and then move them to the triage of the appropriate team&#x27;s space.<p>The biggest limitation we&#x27;ve run into is adding metadata to our issues: labels are great, but when you transfer to another team you lose labels or have to add clutter to that team&#x27;s set of chosen labels.<p>I&#x27;ve ended up building some tooling on top of Linear to record things like user impact assessment data. This tooling posts the data back into the issue as a formatted comment so it&#x27;s visible inline, but we can query it directly in our database and build metrics off of it. This approach has really opened Linear up for us. Thanks for the graphQL end point, it&#x27;s been very helpful!

Being in product and engineering management for more than a decade, Linear is hands down the best tool I’ve used for ticketing. It would be hard for me to work somewhere if I wasn’t able to use it. Features are well designed, the tool is delightful to use and the design is world class. Also, there isn’t a tool I use that feels faster - it’s like they know what I’m about to click on before I do.

I get the appeal of ticketing, I really do. But ultimately, it&#x27;s a form of control. ICs can&#x27;t be trusted to figure out what to do on their own, and can&#x27;t be bothered to talk their team for guidance. And management needs dashboards to track progress. I get it. But I don&#x27;t want to work on a team where such things are necessary.

Our team tried Linear for three months and here are my takes:<p>1. It&#x27;s fast. All interactions are instant.<p>2. It looks great from top to details.<p>3. It&#x27;s quite complex. The information architecture is confusing.<p>Ultimately we decided to go back to GitHub Issues because we spent too much time on clicking and finding things. Hope they fix the UI hierarchy.

When people crib about how the modern web stack is hodgepodge of buzzwords with little-to-no value, you can show them this. Nearly every page loads within milliseconds, and it&#x27;s perfectly usable even if you disable JS. The product itself is a great example of how you can deliver a blazingly fast and near-native experience with web technologies.<p>I have been programming web for nearly 15 years. I, too, have issues with needless complexity, but I also dislike how (many) senior folks want to pretend that simple HTML&#x2F;CSS is all it takes to build anything and all the coders using modern stack are stupid enough to ignore that.

so question if someone from Linear is reading these, which I assume they are:<p>The site says shortcuts for everything. That&#x27;s nice. But one of my biggest gripes is accidental actions with no indication on what you just did. If I have the app open in one window and don&#x27;t realize I have focus and just start typing will it just start doing actions? Is there a way to disable these? Clickup does this to me a lot and its super annoying.

Can anybody from Ramp, Loom, Vercel, Descript, Cash App, Raycast, Mercury, Retool, Alan, Arc, OpenSea or Pitch chime in on their experience with Linear and the scope of which they use it for their apps?

Looks great, but Jira was never getting picked by the users this is marketed to; it&#x27;s picked by their bosses. It&#x27;ll be much tougher to sell those people on an alternative.

We are really happy customers of Linear and have nothing but good things to say about it. Product is light and snappy, customisable just in the right amount and UI&#x2F;UX is very predictable.<p>Biggest weakness is definitely the &quot;workflow&quot; part. For example, trying to automate rather simple workflow that involves email to ticket isn&#x27;t trivial and either requires you writing your own integration or passing via something like Zapier (or writing your own integration with Zapier?).

I tried to convince my team to jump ship to Linear from ClickUp. Initially, we thought that ClickUp would be better than Jira, but ClickUp&#x27;s horrible sync ends up making it slower than Jira since you&#x27;re performing operations over and over again until they stick. ClickUp&#x27;s strategy seems to be to churn out half baked features to get a really impressive feature comparison list to hide under a mountain of tech debt (that&#x27;s how they got us during our trial, at least).<p>I used Linear by myself until the free-tier issue limit was used up. I can confidently say it worked great for me (the integrations and built in GitHub automation were killer for me, and worked with 0 config out of the box). However, I had trouble getting my PM on board because she was concerned that Linear was a great issue tracking tool, but we&#x27;d be losing too many capabilities from ClickUp. Personally, I&#x27;d rather have a targeted tool that does one thing extremely well rather than a tool that does 10 things poorly.

One thing that I hated when I used to use Confluence is the amount of loading it does every, single, time I navigate to any page. I can&#x27;t help but feel the pain of my browser downloading and loading the same thing over and over and over again every day. Please, what is wrong simple user interface like we have here in HN?

I would love to use the app for future projects but I can&#x27;t because the advertised &quot;offline mode&quot; is not what I would expect it to be. If I open the Mac app when I&#x27;m offline I just get a blank window and have no access to any of my data. I assume this is because of a login failure and non of the data is accessible on device. So I have to login once and keep the app open before I go offline. If I close the app while being offline and reopen it without internet connection I won&#x27;t have access to any of my data. This is sadly killing the app for me. Are there any plans to implement a real offline mode? Just a &quot;read only&quot; mode of the last state I had when last logged in would be enough for me.

What I’m missing, is bouncing issues back and forth. We rarely have clearly defined issues, our current system [0] has a &quot;fixer&quot; and a &quot;tester&quot;, if I’m the fixer and I need clarification at some point, I set the issue to &quot;missing information&quot; which removes it from my &quot;issues waiting on you&quot; list, and adds it to the same list for the tester.<p>This is extremely convenient for us as our issues are often discussion threads. I’ve rarely seen this mirrored in other ticketing systems. But then with 1 IT person (Hi), we are not quite the normal customer of such systems.<p>[0] DoneDone V1, which has an atrocious search function and questionable email notifications, can’t remember what our issue was with their current version V2 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.donedone.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.donedone.com&#x2F;</a>

Congrats on the launch of the new website! Feel free to add Contra to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linear.app&#x2F;customers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;linear.app&#x2F;customers</a>. We are avid users of Linear!

This seems like a really nice tool. I&#x27;m quite happy with some of the &quot;older&quot; tools I&#x27;m still using: Shortcut for project management at my company, Trello for personal todo lists, and Evernote for notes. Trying to stick to the philosophy of &quot;if it ain&#x27;t broke, don&#x27;t fix it&quot; when it comes to all these new tools and services. I think Shortcut and Trello are still great tools and I&#x27;m not in a hurry to replace them. But Linear does look very good. Maybe I&#x27;ll try it out whenever I start a new project.

Made with electron? or what tech stack?

I use it for my personal projects and really like it because of how quick and responsive it is plus the overall design aesthetic is pleasing to me. At the end of the day though it&#x27;s an issue tracker and there are quite a few out there. Of the ones I&#x27;ve tried Linear is the best so I hope that they keep improving their product without bloating it too much. That&#x27;s what I&#x27;m worried about most.

I guess some people spend so much time in Jira or whatever that they want keyboard shortcuts for everything? My company uses Jira and I&#x27;m a developer and I&#x27;ve never felt like “oh my god I&#x27;m wasting so much time mousing around in Jira”.

Anyone using linear without the rest of their team adopting it yet? Obviously the full benefits will only be realized when everyone is using it, but I&#x27;m still curious to hear if people are benefitting from using it to manage their own work.

<i>Breathtakingly fast Built for speed with 50ms interactions and real-time sync.</i><p>Sorry but 50ms is not breathtakingly fast, especially when native apps and video games can handle multiple interactions at once in 16ms or even faster.

I love Linear, but my problem is involving clients and external users to do QA for instance, the fact that guest accounts (which are often temporary) are priced as full users makes it too expensive for us.

So I tried to figure out what platforms the app is available for... But it&#x27;s not on the website. The download page just tells me it&#x27;s not available for my current system (Android).

Linear is nice looking app and I the workflow is well thought out.<p>Unfortunately I stopped using due to the lack of robust offline features (this might have improved meanwhile).

We do Kanban in Trello. Is this my new Trello for Kanban?

I don&#x27;t know much about linear but I&#x27;ll describe their landing page as pure design porn.

What is this product anyway?<p>&gt; &quot;Linear is a tool to remove barriers. Powerful yet simple to use, it helps you to plan ahead, make better decisions and execute faster. You don’t have to come up with best practices for how to use Linear — we already built them directly into the product.&quot;<p>So much weasel words. &quot;tool to remove barriers&quot;, &quot;plan ahead, make better decision and execute faster&quot;.<p>Going a bit deep into the features page shows some features, but why not have them front and center, in plain english, on a simple, handmade HTML page, that is fast and easy to browse?<p>Note : I do come from a software engineering background, but as a solo developer.

Reading through the comments it appears more than 10 employees of linear are dominating 33 comments. Sorta seems like this is marketing at its sneakiest.

This is a pure marketing page, that contains nothing but buzzwords and vapid nonsense.