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How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

performance.dev

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Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#131

Post by michaelchisari »

jack_pp wrote: post #25
hamandcheese wrote: post #19

I worry that optimistic updates is going to become trendy and applied to more software, but without any plan for the "sad path" - failed to sync, sync conflict, etc. Get ready for a whole new era of race conditions and frustration!

Don't you have the same problems with basic CRUD apps? Also you need to handle the sad path for every single request instead of having the sync engine do it all in one place.

The complexity required of a basic CRUD app versus a client-side optimistic update are worlds apart.

Exhaust all other optimizations before lying to your users about what just happened.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#132

Post by smt88 »

cyberax wrote: post #117
HoyaSaxa wrote: post #86

We use Linear at work. I’m definitely in the minority, but I really struggle with the UX. I also wouldn’t call it fast. Sure the page technically loads reasonably quickly, but half the time I see numbers updating on the page with no visual indicator that data loading is still happening.

Linear enshittified their UI in the name of "clarity". You know the drill: remove functionality, add small icons with invisible text and HUGE padding, hide controls, etc. For example, the search field only shows if you press "ctrl-f".

I wouldn’t call it enshittification because there’s no business purpose to it.

It’s more like Applification. Apple removes every hint the user needs to know how to use its UIs in the name of “simplicity,” which makes them undiscoverable and complex.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#135

Post by nine_k »

throwaway7783 wrote: post #87
jacobgold wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but there's a ton of complexity in any kind of local-first syncing solution. Often the solution is CRDTs. My point above is that the simple solution ("traditional CRUD app") is actually viable even when the goal is very low latency.

100% agree. A traditional CRUD app (like Linear) can be made pretty low latency without local-first. The complexity is not worth it.

How would you do it? The speed of light being what it is, and tail latencies being large unless you over provision wildly, you keep facing hundreds of milliseconds of reconciliation time, if you want guaranteed synchronous result.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#137

Post by majormajor »

smt88 wrote: post #132
cyberax wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linear enshittified their UI in the name of "clarity". You know the drill: remove functionality, add small icons with invisible text and HUGE padding, hide controls, etc. For example, the search field only shows if you press "ctrl-f".

I wouldn’t call it enshittification because there’s no business purpose to it. It’s more like Applification. Apple removes every hint the user needs to know how to use its UIs in the name of “simplicity,” which makes them undiscoverable and complex.

Apple generally makes it hard to do non-default things, but "basic" functionality is usually evident. E.g. it's not hard to delete a photo in the iPhone photos app; but it's multiple taps to get to manual edit options through a non-obvious-to-newcomers "sliders" button first and then a pen button on the top side of the screen (whereas the first edit button was on the bottom). Advanced stuff isn't discoverable, basic stuff generally is (there are exceptions, of course).

This wave of business apps (Notion is another one) takes things one step further and hides even more things, even the simple stuff. They make it hard to do even a lot of the things I'd consider bare-minimum. The Atlassian apps were't much better, and were in many ways even more annoying, but at least they didn't hide the basic biz-app functionality as much.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#138

Post by iririririr »

SenHeng wrote: post #102
HoyaSaxa wrote: post #86

We use Linear at work. I’m definitely in the minority, but I really struggle with the UX. I also wouldn’t call it fast. Sure the page technically loads reasonably quickly, but half the time I see numbers updating on the page with no visual indicator that data loading is still happening.

A common problem I have with Linear is that repeated writes sometimes overwrite themselves. Consider this flow 1. type 2. stop to ponder for a split second 3. type some more 4. Linear reverts data to step 1 It's bad enough that I'll use Linear to create issues with a single sentence description. This is what Linear is good and fast at. Then I'll switch to GitHub to fill in the details.

their sign up also failed me. probably because i used +

it just told me to f off. lol.

i bet this company got funded, imploded headcount, nobody see a profitable exit, and now they are all fighting each other for quarterly promotions based on whatever metric they can both improve and entice the cto. which i will go on a wild guess and say its page load performance.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#139

Post by ryukoposting »

HoyaSaxa wrote: post #86

We use Linear at work. I’m definitely in the minority, but I really struggle with the UX. I also wouldn’t call it fast. Sure the page technically loads reasonably quickly, but half the time I see numbers updating on the page with no visual indicator that data loading is still happening.

I had a previous employer switch from Linear to Jira because of the wack UX. Lots of icons with no clear meaning, poor discoverability, and yeah, stuff changing on the page with seemingly no indication for why.

Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown

#140

Post by majormajor »

HoyaSaxa wrote: post #86

We use Linear at work. I’m definitely in the minority, but I really struggle with the UX. I also wouldn’t call it fast. Sure the page technically loads reasonably quickly, but half the time I see numbers updating on the page with no visual indicator that data loading is still happening.

I don't use Chrome, so I don't know if that has something to do with it, but Linear pages often hang or take many many seconds for first load.

"Fast" is not a word I'd use for it.

I don't care about going from 300ms to "a few" milliseconds to update an issue when it takes 30 seconds to load the thing in the first place.

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