Comment by ricardobeat

16 hours ago

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.

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.

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.

Linear was simple and fast. Unfortunately it is has become an example of creeping complexity.

They keep adding new features at a steady pace, each slowly making the UI more confusing.

right? or give me GitHub issues before the React rewrite – at least they loaded fast...

Same. And the UI is confusing. The core functionality is buried under the many features I don't need.

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 found middle-clicking to open a link in a new tab was often fragile.

I'd get 10+ tabs all stuck in a "loading" state, and even force-reloading wouldn't make their contents match the address-bar.

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.