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Linear – A fast issue tracker

linear.app

201–210 of 230 posts

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#201
post #3

We've been using Linear for a couple months. It's kind of like Superhuman in that the primary benefit is hotkeys. Otherwise it is an issue tracker. I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems. New issue trackers feel faster for the same reason switching browsers tends to feel faster—you're getting rid of all of the crap you pil…

"I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems."

Imagine what would happen if everyone in an organisation had to use the same tool for text and code editing, say for some reason the PhB inflicted Word on the organisation as the only allowed code editor. Would that be good?

From my pov, most of the churn with ticket trackers is down to current solutions trying to own everything and apply a one size fits all model to everyone in the enterprise. The upshot being that the ticket trackers are invariably a sh*tty compromise for many/most individuals in the organisation. Think about the number of slides and reports that are hand generated for progress meetings in an enterprises. What about all of the various todo apps and systems people use? Why would so much effort be expended if the enterprise ticket tracking system was meeting requirements?

Fixing the problem requires using systems based on common standards that allow _individuals_ to use what works best for them but still interoperates freely with each other. fwiw, another shiney issue tracker will not do that unless its basic unit of tracking is something akin to a text file that can be shared with the next shiney issue tracker.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#202
post #55

Jira is a hot circle of garbage. I am going to check out Linear for my team because I can’t stand how slowly Jira pages load and how long it takes Atlassian to address documented bugs.

Anyone who makes general complaints about Jira like this a) works in a place where Jira has not been correctly configured or b) works in a place with a terrible internet connection c) works in a place where both a) & b) are true or d) doesn't have any idea what they are talking about. P.S. what exactly is "a hot circle of garbage" other than a mixed metaphor?

This isn't quite true, as others have mentioned throughout the thread, JIRA Cloud is noticably slow to use, to the point where doing non-trivial stuff is frustrating - page loads take several seconds, and most operations require a page load. I'd expect their hosted version to offer the best performance, but apparently it doesn't. It's not unusable or anything but it's definitely a very sluggish feeling experience compared to a lot of the SaaS we are used to.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#203
post #3

We've been using Linear for a couple months. It's kind of like Superhuman in that the primary benefit is hotkeys. Otherwise it is an issue tracker. I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems. New issue trackers feel faster for the same reason switching browsers tends to feel faster—you're getting rid of all of the crap you pil…

It's the same with communications tools. "Our email is an INBOX-trillion mess because we use unstructured email rather than structured tickets to manage our processes. Slack is the answer!". Six months later, they have the exact same problem with Slack because the communications patterns haven't changed.

That said, some tools are really just abysmal, and richly deserve the hate directed at them.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#204

All issue trackers can be placed on a spectrum: one end is occupied by very fast and very simple apps, another by complex and flexible ones. Fast ones win in the ease of creation of an issue (just type and hit enter), and generally feel more sexy and attractive, but complex ones can be set up to the exact workflow you need. For example, Google tasks or now-dead service do.com by Salesforce clearly belong to 'easy' en…

What skins do you use? I've found Redmine's default skin to be too stuck in 2010 for me.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#205
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ours JIRA instance took multiple seconds to load modals. Think 5+ seconds. It was miserable. I would have gladly paid more for faster speed but it turned out the APIs were blazing fast and it was the JS that was slow. Not sure how we have had such different experiences. Seems impossible that your JS was executed that much faster than mine. I was using chrome FWIW.

Might be a problem with customization. THE main problem with JIRA is people breaking it with customization in one way or another. Or put is on very slow, high network latency servers... EDIT: Just to be clear, JIRA is never fast. But can be usable if you are not super sensitive to small latency.

> But can be usable if you are not super sensitive to small latency.

Our JIRA instance would lag while typing in the description box. You have to wait a second or two for it to catch up after typing a sentence. It was absolutely unusable.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”. - every JIRA customer ever

We're a JIRA customer and we're quite happy. It's not slow, at least to any degree that matters. We're not a huge team, nor do use much more than tickets with FishEye integration though. We also have a self-hosted instance. But for us it has worked quite well, and I have better memories of JIRA than say MantisBT which I used before.

Same here - went from MantisDB to Jira and it's a big improvement in so many ways.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#207
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried Linear, but my company uses Jira. It's abysmally slow. Not "there are too many tickets and it's hard to manage" slow, just the interface is slow. I opened an issue link in a new tab. It took about 7 seconds for the page to become interactive (able to click on the issue status and get a dropdown) and about 9 seconds for the loading to complete and elements to stop jumping around. This is in Firefox 78…

Is there a site that lets you run performance profiles in browser developer tools and share the results? I could imagine that being really useful internally for devs troubleshooting and working with support. It'd be harder to pull off as a way to shame poor performance because of the need to compare like with like, but I think it's needed to get the attention of folks. Accessibility checkers are often rudimentary, bu…

No clue. I'm an embedded dev, so my method for getting the numbers above was the stopwatch part of my phone's clock app. Thus the "about" qualifiers.

But it's slow enough to use a damn stopwatch app manually. That technique shouldn't even enter the discussion!

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#208

I haven’t tried Linear, but while browsing the site I couldn’t help but notice what an exquisite job the designer did with the Linear site. It’s consistent, lightweight, it has pleasant proportions, a nice color theme, etc. It’s also sprinkled with all kinds of little details that show care, attention and craftsmanship. I wish I’d see more sites like this.

How was it built? Any clue?

They've used Next.js

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#209
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosted, as mentioned.

A lot of issues can be mitigated when you self host vs using JIRA Cloud, not just because you might have beefier hw and better network link. While I suspect it got better, periodic reindexing and similar cron jobs were a hell on a team separated by 9 hour timezone difference, because time chosen for convenience in San Francisco meant many Mondays of "Atlassian Cloud is down" for team in Warsaw.

Wow, that sounds horrible.

While we're all in the same timezone in our company, we're also programmers... so that doesn't always matter. I've been using our JIRA in the middle of the night on several times, and it's just... there.

edit: so yeah just highlights the self-hosting vs cloud...

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#210

All issue trackers can be placed on a spectrum: one end is occupied by very fast and very simple apps, another by complex and flexible ones. Fast ones win in the ease of creation of an issue (just type and hit enter), and generally feel more sexy and attractive, but complex ones can be set up to the exact workflow you need. For example, Google tasks or now-dead service do.com by Salesforce clearly belong to 'easy' en…

What skins do you use? I've found Redmine's default skin to be too stuck in 2010 for me.

We're using Circle theme [1], it's not the most modern out there, but it looks OK with our agile plugin. Abacus and Zenmine are the themes that look most 'modern' to me, but I didn't try them out.

[1]: https://www.redmineup.com/pages/themes/circle

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