Linear.app(linear.app)
linear.app
Linear.app
https://linear.app/homepage
131 comments
I couldn't find a mention of it - but is there any plans or ability to self-host? I'm personally not a fan of keeping everything in the cloud. Also are there export options in the event someone wanted to leave the platform?
We unfortunately don't currently have plans to provide self-hosting.
Darn that rules it out for my use. Best of luck though, it looks really cool!
Good luck Karri!
I am so glad that I picked Linear for my startup. You folks have been consistently responsive, helpful, and keep delivering features that matter. It’s been a delight after a decade of Jira and the gang.
I am so glad that I picked Linear for my startup. You folks have been consistently responsive, helpful, and keep delivering features that matter. It’s been a delight after a decade of Jira and the gang.
Congratulations! By “DDoS” you probably mean the “Hacker News effect” from hitting #1 on the front page.
And for that, congratulations!
And for that, congratulations!
If only... Coordinated botnet attack against our service that started some hours ago but fortunately we have been able to mitigate it through number of means and return service to users
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I have used Linear on a couple of my hobby projects and it's a great tool to quickly capture features and bugs.
My one gripe about the new website (and it's something I notice many projects stumble at) is that the written copy fails to explain what the product actually is. "A better way to build products", "the new standard for software development", "a tool to remove barriers" -- this tells me nothing, unlike a simple "it's an issue tracker bro" would.
My one gripe about the new website (and it's something I notice many projects stumble at) is that the written copy fails to explain what the product actually is. "A better way to build products", "the new standard for software development", "a tool to remove barriers" -- this tells me nothing, unlike a simple "it's an issue tracker bro" would.
I thought the fact that it was an issue tracker was self evident from the first picture on the page.
Show don't tell!
Show don't tell!
I'm sure the visually impaired users appreciate that a lot.
"Show, don't tell" is good advice for creative writing, which this website isn't. As a potential customer, it shouldn't be my job to cut through the marketing fluff to figure out if a product is something that is relevant to me.
This buzzword-driven style of writing, which has infected many a software project in recent years, is a pure triumph of form over function. Maybe it is necessary to appeal to the CTO types of the industry, but as a simple developer I do find it confusing and frankly repulsive.
"Show, don't tell" is good advice for creative writing, which this website isn't. As a potential customer, it shouldn't be my job to cut through the marketing fluff to figure out if a product is something that is relevant to me.
This buzzword-driven style of writing, which has infected many a software project in recent years, is a pure triumph of form over function. Maybe it is necessary to appeal to the CTO types of the industry, but as a simple developer I do find it confusing and frankly repulsive.
I immediately scroll down to a picture/video. If you don't show me something I am gone. The Linear home page is incredible in my eyes. Just as a visually impaired user might not like pictures, a dyslexic person might not like text. Just another perspective for ya.
Possibly the marketing gang writing copy about ‘benefits’ instead of features? It’s supposed to help drive conversion.
I'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 "breathtakingly fast" as the website claims. It's much better than the tools mentioned above, but doesn't really cut it for me. Maybe I'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'm so tired of seeing marketing speak like "UI elegance with world-class performance" to then be only disappointed in the difference between my and the author's views on what "performance" means.
Feature-wise Linear looks great though, so I might give it another try in some time.
P.S. Can someone please explain the hate for the pointer cursor? Why some products refuse to use it for links and buttons?
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/performance. It's just that I hate how the meaning of the word "performance" devalued with time and claims like "50ms = breathtakingly fast/world-class" continue to contribute to that.
Feature-wise Linear looks great though, so I might give it another try in some time.
P.S. Can someone please explain the hate for the pointer cursor? Why some products refuse to use it for links and buttons?
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/performance. It's just that I hate how the meaning of the word "performance" devalued with time and claims like "50ms = breathtakingly fast/world-class" continue to contribute to that.
From memory there's an option in the settings to enable pointer cursor.
I'd wager they're doing it becuase a pointer cursor feels more like a web browser, and would impede the feeling of the app being native.
I'd wager they're doing it becuase a pointer cursor feels more like a web browser, and would impede the feeling of the app being native.
> P.S. Can someone please explain the hate for the pointer cursor? Why some products refuse to use it for links and buttons?
It's not some, it's most. I just checked my Linux and Windows machines and all of the native apps (and the native UI of the system itself) there have a regular cursor when you hover over clickable elements.
It's not some, it's most. I just checked my Linux and Windows machines and all of the native apps (and the native UI of the system itself) there have a regular cursor when you hover over clickable elements.
I agree, it's quite ridiculous to call that performant when considering the reality of what's possible. But compared to other electron apps, it's way better, and the team has done a good job with the bad tools given. I suppose the bar isn't very high when it comes to performance, but it's a nice positive signal that it's used as a marketing point like that. Although you do point out that the expectations are often like from two different worlds, which is true. I guess it leaves room for competent competitors.
I'm pretty sure 50ms latency between click and feedback is imperceptible to most humans. That's 3 frames at 60fps.
I don't know what superhuman perception you have, but I'm personally good with anything up to 100ms.
The alternative is Jira where we're talking something like 5000ms to load an issue.
I don't know what superhuman perception you have, but I'm personally good with anything up to 100ms.
The alternative is Jira where we're talking something like 5000ms to load an issue.
50ms isn't instantaneous, but when you compare it to the 500ms-2s waits you see in Jira sometimes, it feels really damn fast. I think Linear's headed in the right direction, even if their marketing copy isn't perfect
Can't speak for other teams who may have advanced, complex workflows but we migrated from JIRA to Linear for our small team, and haven't looked back. Just the simple fact that it feels like we can store and reference information from a ticket without spending 10 minutes waiting for it to load is a killer feature to me.
I stopped using Jira years ago, and stopped hiring people, and work with one other full time person, making a complex software product, and I feel like I accomplish 2x as much as I used to with much more value, at far lower cost.
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's design in Figma, where you could see a chaotic cloud of cursors belonging to everyone else trying to file a ticket.
Said Figma design: https://www.figma.com/file/SBkJnBwITTA3lkHCb5Oopz/Community-...
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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.
The killer missing feature for us is that we can't define different issue types. For example, we would typically have issue types like "Requirement", "Bug", "Signal", etc. with different icons and use child/parent hierarchies to sort these in a tree with this hierarchy: L1 high-level business requirement, L2 technical breakdown stories, L3 very specific requirement/bug/signal.
In line with this, there's no way to show the issue layout as an expandable tree-view (called "List" view in JIRA), and so our requirements tree would get all mashed up and flattened.
For each technical story/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'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.
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.
Otherwise ... it looks nice. Have you thought about offering a self-hosted version, since JIRA no longer offers this?
The killer missing feature for us is that we can't define different issue types. For example, we would typically have issue types like "Requirement", "Bug", "Signal", etc. with different icons and use child/parent hierarchies to sort these in a tree with this hierarchy: L1 high-level business requirement, L2 technical breakdown stories, L3 very specific requirement/bug/signal.
In line with this, there's no way to show the issue layout as an expandable tree-view (called "List" view in JIRA), and so our requirements tree would get all mashed up and flattened.
For each technical story/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'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.
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.
Otherwise ... it looks nice. Have you thought about offering a self-hosted version, since JIRA no longer offers this?
Actually, I think your post highlights a couple important things:
1. The reason everyone hates Jira is because, over time, it has essentially become all things to all people, yet it doesn't solve the needs of any individual group perfectly. It actually has a huge, ginormous feature set, and part of the difficulty is figuring which settings or set of features are right for your team.
2. The reason Jira has become so difficult to replace is because nearly every team of moderate complexity uses some subset of features that aren't replicated in any other tool.
So, to the point, I hope that Linear doesn't implement your requested features (not exactly, but I just hope they are extremely judicious in which features they add). Or, rather, I'd just point out that Jira got to be the way it is because they basically implemented all the features. I think a good competitor will necessarily have to hit that sweet spot where they have 98% of the most critical features (especially startups/new companies), but will ruthlessly not add features that will lead to bloat and complexity.
1. The reason everyone hates Jira is because, over time, it has essentially become all things to all people, yet it doesn't solve the needs of any individual group perfectly. It actually has a huge, ginormous feature set, and part of the difficulty is figuring which settings or set of features are right for your team.
2. The reason Jira has become so difficult to replace is because nearly every team of moderate complexity uses some subset of features that aren't replicated in any other tool.
So, to the point, I hope that Linear doesn't implement your requested features (not exactly, but I just hope they are extremely judicious in which features they add). Or, rather, I'd just point out that Jira got to be the way it is because they basically implemented all the features. I think a good competitor will necessarily have to hit that sweet spot where they have 98% of the most critical features (especially startups/new companies), but will ruthlessly not add features that will lead to bloat and complexity.
> The killer missing feature for us is that we can't define different issue types. For example, we would typically have issue types like "Requirement", "Bug", "Signal", etc. with different icons and use child/parent hierarchies to sort these in a tree with this hierarchy: L1 high-level business requirement, L2 technical breakdown stories, L3 very specific requirement/bug/signal.
Support for this kind of overcomplex use case is what makes JIRA so horrible to use. I very much hope Linear never bloats itself by adding this kind of thing.
Support for this kind of overcomplex use case is what makes JIRA so horrible to use. I very much hope Linear never bloats itself by adding this kind of thing.
You'd better hope that enough people need a very barebones tracker (thousands of barebone trackers exist) enough to pay for it and keep it alive. Or you can implement the "overcomplex use case"(s) and create a product that is actually more useful than those other thousand of issue trackers built-in to tools that people already use.
Hell no. If you want jira, use Jira. Linear is better specifically because it's not Jira and doesn't try to be.
A huge part of its appeal is that it actively prevents workflows like yours. On purpose.
A huge part of its appeal is that it actively prevents workflows like yours. On purpose.
I honestly despise Confluence. Jira is kind of OK if you don't create overly complex workflow (they will fail) and avoid using it as a documentation tool (it's not versioned, editing tool are lacking, adding content is quite limited, updating content while fighting field is not fun and finding back the last CR related to a feature is hell).
But Confluence is the worst Wiki I've ever used. It's editor is obnoxious, it's so damn slow, you're losing edit whenever anything happen, tagging is quite often random (recently it added an unwanted "my.favorite" tag to page I'm copying), it's search is broken since the beginning, hierarchical view is broken, creating add on requires to be a high level admin and the implementation is horrible... And I've been forced to use Confluence for 10 years now, in multiple company. None was ever good with it. Heck, here people are screaming to go back to Sharepoint.
But Confluence is the worst Wiki I've ever used. It's editor is obnoxious, it's so damn slow, you're losing edit whenever anything happen, tagging is quite often random (recently it added an unwanted "my.favorite" tag to page I'm copying), it's search is broken since the beginning, hierarchical view is broken, creating add on requires to be a high level admin and the implementation is horrible... And I've been forced to use Confluence for 10 years now, in multiple company. None was ever good with it. Heck, here people are screaming to go back to Sharepoint.
I've been using Confulence for a long time in all my companies. It's not the best product for sure.
However, regarding:
1) slowness - it's faster selfhosted than their shitty cloud solution
2) editor - one of the best features, not replicated anywhere is their macro collection. I'd prefer markdown, but dynamic object embedded in our specs/documentation is a very useful feature. Also for non-technical people their editor even in current state is easier than other non-WYSIWYG editors for sure.
There is a place for a competitor to Confluence, because the need is still there. Help non-technical people capture and buld documents self-hosted inside your firewall with dynamic elements.
Atlassian's decision to dump the self-hosted version in 2024 will create the niche for all the companies that would want to migrate away. They just got greedy and got too big, went public, founders cached out and now it's the hired managers playground.
There is a place for a competitor to Confluence, because the need is still there. Help non-technical people capture and buld documents self-hosted inside your firewall with dynamic elements.
Atlassian's decision to dump the self-hosted version in 2024 will create the niche for all the companies that would want to migrate away. They just got greedy and got too big, went public, founders cached out and now it's the hired managers playground.
They've (recently?) introduced a feature where they disable the editor window in Confluence if the browser even momentarily loses the network connection. On a poor network it's absolutely unusable now.
This is the sort of workflow that makes Jira suck... so much mental capacity is wasted on categorization rather than coding. It simultaneously tries to be an issue tracker and a project manager and each team reinvents their own preferred workflow while littering the shared Jira graveyard with a bunch of dead fields and labels and screens and such.
Linear does the opposite, adding rails so you can't go wild and reinvent complex processes. Thank god.
Linear does the opposite, adding rails so you can't go wild and reinvent complex processes. Thank god.
We didn’t invent this workflow, it is mandated by high assurance software standards like ISO 26262.
Sounds like a good category of software to avoid :)
When you say very advanced way do you mean Jira workflows? Or do you mean more than that?
On the Confluence note, they do have docs support: https://linear.app/docs/project-documents
Wouldn't tags for for this? It's similar to how I use them.
We could use tags for this, but with an issue type hierarchy you can strongly-type your database i.e. make sure that people don't put a Signal under a high-level business requirement.
And different issue types in JIRA allows us to have different workflows and optional fields for different types of issues, ie in the use-case above the Requirement field has an extra field to mention a corresponding document and most of the issue types except business requirement have an extra field to fill in the source file where we will implement it.
And different issue types in JIRA allows us to have different workflows and optional fields for different types of issues, ie in the use-case above the Requirement field has an extra field to mention a corresponding document and most of the issue types except business requirement have an extra field to fill in the source file where we will implement it.
For a small team, I can say Linear beats the hell out of JIRA.
I sure don'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 sure don'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.
It doesn't take much to beat JIRA ;).
But seriously, Linear is one of the best project management tools I've used. They do an SPA pretty well, which is rare, and its powerful yet pretty simple to use. I do find it a bit hard to wrangle saved views and find things via search sometimes, but overall its one of the 'least bad' tools in this category.
The only other app that I would say is comparable is Shortcut (https://shortcut.com), which I've used in anger at previous jobs. It's a bit simpler than Linear, a bit easier to get up to speed with, but less powerful.
But both are very good. And god help you if you have to use JIRA.
But seriously, Linear is one of the best project management tools I've used. They do an SPA pretty well, which is rare, and its powerful yet pretty simple to use. I do find it a bit hard to wrangle saved views and find things via search sometimes, but overall its one of the 'least bad' tools in this category.
The only other app that I would say is comparable is Shortcut (https://shortcut.com), which I've used in anger at previous jobs. It's a bit simpler than Linear, a bit easier to get up to speed with, but less powerful.
But both are very good. And god help you if you have to use JIRA.
Same, if we’re going to talk about Linear I’d also like to say it’s probably one of the best webs apps that does one thing really well. Any tool for organizing teams of programmers should be a) dead simple and b) extremely performant. Which Linear does both.
Probably one the fastest web app around, given how it preloads all JSON data from all sublinks on the page, so it loads immediately when you click on any links. It performs like a native app (assuming it’s online :p, it has offline support w/ the Mac and browser apps for plan B)
Probably one the fastest web app around, given how it preloads all JSON data from all sublinks on the page, so it loads immediately when you click on any links. It performs like a native app (assuming it’s online :p, it has offline support w/ the Mac and browser apps for plan B)
Interesting question, would Linear performance slow down once it becomes heavily loaded? Are you confusing app performance preference for usage preference, or is there something where Linear is superior at a feature level? If JIRA's performance was lightning fast when heavily loaded, would your preference still be Linear?
I am seeing multiple references here to 30 second long page loads.
What is causing your JIRA projects to take that long? Too many custom fields? Large numbers of issues? Too many plugins? Really curious because most of our issues are sub-second.
What is causing your JIRA projects to take that long? Too many custom fields? Large numbers of issues? Too many plugins? Really curious because most of our issues are sub-second.
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 :)
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's space.
The biggest limitation we'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's set of chosen labels.
I'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'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's been very helpful!
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's space.
The biggest limitation we'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's set of chosen labels.
I'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'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'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's a form of control. ICs can't be trusted to figure out what to do on their own, and can't be bothered to talk their team for guidance. And management needs dashboards to track progress. I get it. But I don't want to work on a team where such things are necessary.
Ticketing is a form of organization. If it's being used to control people, that's a problem with the org, not ticketing.
Simply having everyone do what they think is best and hoping they talk enough to sort that all out on their own is great until you have several people unsure what to work on, two people accidentally doing the same thing, and management upset because your features are taking twice or thrice as long as your guestimates.
Eventually you realize that for anything sufficiently complex you need to track what the steps are, who is doing what, and when each part is probably going to be done. You don't want to be a bottleneck, so you make it publicly available to the whole team. Then congrats, you've invented ticketing.
Simply having everyone do what they think is best and hoping they talk enough to sort that all out on their own is great until you have several people unsure what to work on, two people accidentally doing the same thing, and management upset because your features are taking twice or thrice as long as your guestimates.
Eventually you realize that for anything sufficiently complex you need to track what the steps are, who is doing what, and when each part is probably going to be done. You don't want to be a bottleneck, so you make it publicly available to the whole team. Then congrats, you've invented ticketing.
It’s not as simple as that. ‘Talking’ doesn’t create a reference where you can see what’s been done yet, and of course people leave teams or get sick etc. so there are many reasons to want to see what was and wasn’t completed.
On a small enough scale, 'talking' does work. So do post-its etc.
If kotlin2 sticks to those small enough scales, they can indulge their preferences.
Bigger organisations have more and more need for structure.
If kotlin2 sticks to those small enough scales, they can indulge their preferences.
Bigger organisations have more and more need for structure.
Very true. My point was that you don’t have to use ticketing as a control mechanism - you can use it however you like and it doesn’t imply distrust. Similarly you can have an overbearing or micromanaging boss whether or not ticketing is used.
I'd wager that the original idea here is more akin to a list of task, with some info added on top of it. That's how I see it myself.
And yes, I need to have a status. It allows me to warn people outside the dev team if there are any outstanding issues or if we'll be able to soon release something. Communication is key when your team is not its sole customer.
And yes, I need to have a status. It allows me to warn people outside the dev team if there are any outstanding issues or if we'll be able to soon release something. Communication is key when your team is not its sole customer.
That's one form that ticketing can take, but I think it's way off to suggest that's all ticketing is. I've known even solo devs who got a lot of benefit out of a (simple) ticketing system.
As your organisation get bigger some structure and bureaucracy is necessary and beneficial.
Of course, whether that structure and bureaucracy needs to be a ticketing system is a different question.
Of course, whether that structure and bureaucracy needs to be a ticketing system is a different question.
Our team tried Linear for three months and here are my takes:
1. It's fast. All interactions are instant.
2. It looks great from top to details.
3. It's quite complex. The information architecture is confusing.
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.
1. It's fast. All interactions are instant.
2. It looks great from top to details.
3. It's quite complex. The information architecture is confusing.
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'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.
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/CSS is all it takes to build anything and all the coders using modern stack are stupid enough to ignore that.
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/CSS is all it takes to build anything and all the coders using modern stack are stupid enough to ignore that.
> I also dislike how (many) senior folks want to pretend that simple HTML/CSS is all it takes to build anything
Although simple HTML/CSS cannot build anything (not even close), simple HTML/CSS with a sprinkle of good JS can get you very far.
Although simple HTML/CSS cannot build anything (not even close), simple HTML/CSS with a sprinkle of good JS can get you very far.
so question if someone from Linear is reading these, which I assume they are:
The site says shortcuts for everything. That'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'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.
The site says shortcuts for everything. That'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'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.
Reddit does this, annoyingly after typing Ctrl-F. I have to wait a short while until the browser's search bar pops up at the bottom, otherwise my instinct to immediately start typing the search phrase causes all sorts of actions, like following some people, hiding a thread, who knows what random stuff happens on each key press.
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?
Co-founder of Raycast here. We've been using Linear since the beginning when it was only two of us. We're 16, and the app has become integral to our workflows. In a small company, it's crucial to be aligned. We use Linear to spec out our work and build up momentum. We ship an update of Raycast every two weeks and use cycles and projects to ensure we keep the release schedule.
I love the speed of the app. The real-time sync and keyboard shortcuts guarantee fast interactions. We surround ourselves with the best tools to raise the bar of what everybody expects from software. It helps us to build better software, and Linear is an app (and website) that pushes our understanding of quality forward.
I love the speed of the app. The real-time sync and keyboard shortcuts guarantee fast interactions. We surround ourselves with the best tools to raise the bar of what everybody expects from software. It helps us to build better software, and Linear is an app (and website) that pushes our understanding of quality forward.
Thanks for responding
Hey there, I'm an engineer at The Browser Company (who makes Arc).
It's critical to our eng, design & product processes.
We switched from another tool because the other tool was painfully slow. It was a night & day difference. It's been about a year now since we've fully committed to Linear. I'm very glad we have!
We use their cycles feature heavily. We ship our app weekly, and our product development process is split into three 2-week cycles that form a "milestone". We model that work accordingly in Linear.
We also use their "Projects" feature quite heavily. We'll often have folks working across a few projects a time. This feature helps my ADHD brain understand what the most important thing across any number of ongoing projects is, and then focus on accomplishing that.
Personally, the best feature for me is the speed of the app. That, alongside the keyboard shortcuts, make it pretty hard to give up.
Another thing I particularly like about Linear (aside from speed, product polish & wonderful design) is how you can opt-in to using it more. If you just want to use it as an issue tracker for teams, that works great! It's how we started. But you can also grow into the product more as you harden your processes or figure out what works best for you.
tl;dr — I can't imagine ever using another tool to help build products besides Linear.
It's critical to our eng, design & product processes.
We switched from another tool because the other tool was painfully slow. It was a night & day difference. It's been about a year now since we've fully committed to Linear. I'm very glad we have!
We use their cycles feature heavily. We ship our app weekly, and our product development process is split into three 2-week cycles that form a "milestone". We model that work accordingly in Linear.
We also use their "Projects" feature quite heavily. We'll often have folks working across a few projects a time. This feature helps my ADHD brain understand what the most important thing across any number of ongoing projects is, and then focus on accomplishing that.
Personally, the best feature for me is the speed of the app. That, alongside the keyboard shortcuts, make it pretty hard to give up.
Another thing I particularly like about Linear (aside from speed, product polish & wonderful design) is how you can opt-in to using it more. If you just want to use it as an issue tracker for teams, that works great! It's how we started. But you can also grow into the product more as you harden your processes or figure out what works best for you.
tl;dr — I can't imagine ever using another tool to help build products besides Linear.
Looks great, but Jira was never getting picked by the users this is marketed to; it's picked by their bosses. It'll be much tougher to sell those people on an alternative.
JIRAs growth strategy was based on developers adopting it without having to talk to their bosses first because it was cheap enough to do so. Nowadays, this probably works differently, but that’s how they initially gained traction.
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/UX is very predictable.
Biggest weakness is definitely the "workflow" part. For example, trying to automate rather simple workflow that involves email to ticket isn't trivial and either requires you writing your own integration or passing via something like Zapier (or writing your own integration with Zapier?).
Biggest weakness is definitely the "workflow" part. For example, trying to automate rather simple workflow that involves email to ticket isn'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's horrible sync ends up making it slower than Jira since you're performing operations over and over again until they stick. ClickUp'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's how they got us during our trial, at least).
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'd be losing too many capabilities from ClickUp. Personally, I'd rather have a targeted tool that does one thing extremely well rather than a tool that does 10 things poorly.
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'd be losing too many capabilities from ClickUp. Personally, I'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'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't because the advertised "offline mode" is not what I would expect it to be. If I open the Mac app when I'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'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 "read only" 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 "fixer" and a "tester", if I’m the fixer and I need clarification at some point, I set the issue to "missing information" which removes it from my "issues waiting on you" list, and adds it to the same list for the tester.
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.
[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 https://www.donedone.com/
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.
[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 https://www.donedone.com/
Congrats on the launch of the new website! Feel free to add Contra to https://linear.app/customers. We are avid users of Linear!
This seems like a really nice tool. I'm quite happy with some of the "older" tools I'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
"if it ain't broke, don't fix it" when it comes to all these new tools and services. I think Shortcut and Trello are still great tools and I'm not in a hurry to replace them. But Linear does look very good. Maybe I'll try it out whenever I start a new project.
Evernote is a classic example of destroying an app by using Electron.
I'm using it every day. I have analyzed all alternatives and all of them fail with something, especialy since the Tasks feature was introduced. So, no, it has not been destroyed. I has been tough, but I think a lot of people use it and are happy with it.
Made with electron? or what tech stack?
(Cofounder here) The app is fullstack typescript react application with custom realtime sync engine for instant updates and offline readiness. Our cofounder did a talk about our sync few years back: https://youtu.be/WxK11RsLqp4?t=2171
The app works both in the browser and we also distribute it with Electron wrapper for macOS and Windows, but it's essentially the same experience.
The app works both in the browser and we also distribute it with Electron wrapper for macOS and Windows, but it's essentially the same experience.
How did you get it to be so fast, the performance of the app and snappy mess of the UI is outstanding!
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's an issue tracker and there are quite a few out there. Of the ones I've tried Linear is the best so I hope that they keep improving their product without bloating it too much. That's what I'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'm a developer and I've never felt like “oh my god I'm wasting so much time mousing around in Jira”.
I use Jira a lot and... there are keyboard shortcuts. There are keyboard shortcuts for Confluence.
I did not know about the jira shortcuts until recently. Not really a huge deal for me. Seems like linear's are definitely better but shrug. Keyboard shortcuts are not the source of my issues (ha!) with issue trackers.
Confluence shortcuts tho. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in my company that knows them haha. Which says something about confluence for sure.
I did not know about the jira shortcuts until recently. Not really a huge deal for me. Seems like linear's are definitely better but shrug. Keyboard shortcuts are not the source of my issues (ha!) with issue trackers.
Confluence shortcuts tho. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one in my company that knows them haha. Which says something about confluence for sure.
Jira used to aggressively interpret keyboard input as a stream of hotkeys which would result in entropy being introduced into your board. Latest redesign fixed that, but at the cost of being criminally slow.
Yes. Across all companies I’d guess 20% of what goes into jira effort actually aids development, with the remaining 80% primarily aiding people other than the developers to understand how the development is unfolding and will unfold.
Sounds like at some point someone set up a good system there.
Sounds like at some point someone set up a good system there.
It probably depends on setups, but at Robinhood, Jira would take 15 seconds to load a wiki page (any wiki page)
You’re lucky then
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'm still curious to hear if people are benefitting from using it to manage their own work.
I work with two long term clients (one has two projects going on, the other three), plus I have my own personal projects.
Linear has become a vital part of my workflow. The first thing is that splitting tasks by teams (client 1, client 2, and me) and then by project for each team allows me to do some neat stuff:
1. I have a global view, where i can see the status of each single ticket. I use this because when I’m selecting my next task. I don’t know if I’m gonna choose something from client 1, client 2, or my personal project
2. I have a “bug” view that aggregates every task with a bug label, it’s the first thing I check when selecting a new task, same reason of .1
3. I have a view for each client, that aggregates the tasks from every project of that client. I use this when I’m doing a call with the client and I have to update them on the status of each project
Before Linear I was using multiple Trello boards and then using a power up to sync all of them in multiple aggregation board, to essentially replicate the same workflow. Also, it feels more native then trello, it’s quicker than Jira and the key lard shortcut are super handy when I’m creating a lot of tasks, since I have to duplicate each task from the client ticketing system.
1. I have a global view, where i can see the status of each single ticket. I use this because when I’m selecting my next task. I don’t know if I’m gonna choose something from client 1, client 2, or my personal project
2. I have a “bug” view that aggregates every task with a bug label, it’s the first thing I check when selecting a new task, same reason of .1
3. I have a view for each client, that aggregates the tasks from every project of that client. I use this when I’m doing a call with the client and I have to update them on the status of each project
Before Linear I was using multiple Trello boards and then using a power up to sync all of them in multiple aggregation board, to essentially replicate the same workflow. Also, it feels more native then trello, it’s quicker than Jira and the key lard shortcut are super handy when I’m creating a lot of tasks, since I have to duplicate each task from the client ticketing system.
Thanks for sharing, that's helpful. I'm also using multiple trello boards to manage my own work while our team uses Jira (which is awful).
Breathtakingly fast
Built for speed with 50ms interactions and real-time sync.
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.
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.
Sure but have you ever used Jira?
I have never meet anyone who has used Jira, only suffered under it. (Though I will say my main complaints about Jira are ideological, rather than purely technical. I would dislike it even if there were 1ms page loads).
I don't think that's a fair performance bar to set for web apps, or even native apps. The 16ms window for games is used to process input, shuffle data in very fast memory, do calculations, and render a frame on a very fast GPU specifically built for that purpose.
Web apps can also render frames in 16ms, but input often involves fetching data from much slower and unreliable disk or network, processing data on a much slower general purpose CPU, and rendering it via runtimes and frameworks that add considerable overhead. Given all of that, 50ms (20 FPS) does sound very responsive, if maybe not breathtakingly so.
Web apps can also render frames in 16ms, but input often involves fetching data from much slower and unreliable disk or network, processing data on a much slower general purpose CPU, and rendering it via runtimes and frameworks that add considerable overhead. Given all of that, 50ms (20 FPS) does sound very responsive, if maybe not breathtakingly so.
It's not uncommon to see input latency on consoles that high(or slightly higher even).
Are you familiar with console input latencies?
Are you familiar with console input latencies?
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's not on the website. The download page just tells me it's not available for my current system (Android).
It's just a web app, isn't it?
There is a download page, so no, there seems to be something more.
There’s an electron wrapper for macOS and Windows, but it’s the same as the web app, so you’re not missing out on anything.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199562
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199562
Linear is nice looking app and I the workflow is well thought out.
Unfortunately I stopped using due to the lack of robust offline features (this might have improved meanwhile).
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't know much about linear but I'll describe their landing page as pure design porn.
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What is this product anyway?
> "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."
So much weasel words. "tool to remove barriers", "plan ahead, make better decision and execute faster".
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?
Note : I do come from a software engineering background, but as a solo developer.
> "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."
So much weasel words. "tool to remove barriers", "plan ahead, make better decision and execute faster".
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?
Note : I do come from a software engineering background, but as a solo developer.
It's a ticketing system whose killer feature is that practically everything is a keyboard shortcut.
It's pretty neat and let's you really get in the flow of things.
It's pretty neat and let's you really get in the flow of things.
Its not obvious at first sight.
Being contrarian about landing pages is just a popular HN meme at this point... Front and center:
Streamline issues, sprints, and product roadmaps.
Built for your keyboard - Fly through your tasks with rapid-fire keyboard shortcuts for everything.When people say contrarian, it means it became mainstream :)
For every single post of product announcement there is a comment bitching about `value prop`. I agree sometimes marketing messages are terribly written. Look at the Obsidian thread from yesterday. Similar complaints.
However... all it takes is just to scroll. There is a screenshot which takes 60% of the homepage screen that shows an issue tracker.
Cmon folks, we can do better.
For every single post of product announcement there is a comment bitching about `value prop`. I agree sometimes marketing messages are terribly written. Look at the Obsidian thread from yesterday. Similar complaints.
However... all it takes is just to scroll. There is a screenshot which takes 60% of the homepage screen that shows an issue tracker.
Cmon folks, we can do better.
I got a "so what" effect in under 1.5 seconds from opening the website which resulted into me ctrl+w'ing my ass out of it. If your landing page is like this it just blows.
it's possible for two things to be simultaneously true: you're not the target market, and the landing page doesn't "blow"
What do you mean by a "so what" effect? Not sure I've heard that phrase before used in the context of an effect.
This is very popular in academic world. “So what” effect usually means so what is the point of this paper/website/articles? After the reader have read the whole thing from top to bottom.
> Streamline issues, sprints, and product roadmaps.
How about - Software that simplifies work management for teams
How about - Software that simplifies work management for teams
At this point you are grasping at straws. Your initial point was:
> What is this product anyway?
It's extremely clear what their product is, and scrolling just a little immediately gives you an idea of how they are trying to differentiate. Your current suggestion is a simple copy change that's very slightly different from the original.
> What is this product anyway?
It's extremely clear what their product is, and scrolling just a little immediately gives you an idea of how they are trying to differentiate. Your current suggestion is a simple copy change that's very slightly different from the original.
A lot of websites are like this for products, it makes it really tedious to navigate
It's an issue tracker with insane frontend technical investment.
It's like JIRA but better, more specifically built for software engineers as opposed to being a general tool.
Jira introduced mainstream audiences to "one task assigned to one person." A radical idea, then, in corporate environments. Everything else doesn't matter.
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It's pretty clear what it is and those aren't weasel words. You might just not read very well.
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.
It's a really easy mistake to make so I don't blame them. When people are talking about your product it's instinctive to jump in; it takes a lot of effort to not dominate the conversation.
Seems unlikely it is sneaky marketing considering this was posted to HN right as they were in the middle of a multi-hour DDoS.
My guess is that they are excited about their product being on here.
My guess is that they are excited about their product being on here.
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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&A: https://twitter.com/linear/status/1580723933837332480)