Linear Is Jira With the Shame Removed
Same objects, less residue. The spinner was the humiliation. The database remains.
[ essay ]
Linear is Jira with the shame removed: the same shape of issue, status, and cycle, without the 2014 Java slowness and the custom-field priesthood. I have used Linear as a user when a collaboration already ran it. Dark Heart Labs’ canonical queue for public code is still GitHub Issues. I am not a Linear employee. A keyboard-first tracker is not why mystic-bytes builds.
The product bet is speed and opinion. Issues are light. GitHub and Slack attach without a plugin bazaar. Cycles replace the ceremony of a Jira sprint config.1 Keyboard shortcuts are the GUI. The shame Linear removed is the shame of waiting on a spinner while you try to type a sentence about the work. What it did not remove is the database. You still perform for the issue. The record still wants a status. A pretty graph of cycle time is still a graph of whether you updated the record.
Use Linear when the team wants Jira’s objects and refuses Jira’s residue. Use GitHub Issues when the work already lives on the forge. A faster database of work is still a database of work. I keep the shame in mind even when the spinner is gone.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.
References
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Linear Docs, “Use cycles,” https://linear.app/docs/use-cycles. Timeboxed issue work without Jira’s sprint-admin ceremony. Speed is the product. The issue is still the database. ↩