jira is a product that i'd describe as "best of the worst"... i'm totally open to a better ticketing system but they all seem to suck in one way or another...
Linear is unfortunately too opinionated. At my last gig my manager wanted everybody to be using the same task tracker (understandably) and I wanted our team to move to a Kanban process because we evolved into the Infra/DevOps/IT team and ended up doing very little product work. At the time there was no way to operate in this paradigm as Linear forced you to use "Cycles" (a proprietary term for a time box) and it meant that we had to keep doing faux-Scrum.
I'm no particular JIRA fan and have had the misfortune of having had to administer an on-prem instance of it but the people who complain about it have clearly never used TFS or the bespoke solutions hacked together from off-the-shelf software (Domino, Sharepoint, Notion) that I've been exposed to. JIRA's a solid 6.8/10 and has always been far down the list of things that I'd change at any job I've had that uses it.
As a counter point, I've used several and have found them all more or less fine. It's always been the quality of the lead / PM that mattered _far_ more, and I've never seen bike shedding / switching around tracking tools to offer any value. Old (extremely slow) JIRA was the only time I felt the tool was really affecting the team's productivity, but the last several years JIRA cloud has seemed fine too.
I can appreciate preferring customizable tools, but if I were to personally choose for the company I'd prefer a constrained and opinionated one. Not coincidentally, this is analogous to the choice many companies make in their programming languages / linters the team's use.
Linear definitely does not force you to use Cycles. Cycles aren't even enabled by default. You have to specifically go into your team and enable it. It isn't a global setting either. It's a per team. So one team can do it while another doesn't have to.
My guess is you wanted a Kanban board but didn't realize you can change the standard ticket view to a board view? If you're in the Active issue view for your team you can click the boxes icon at the top right (or hit cmd-b) to get a kanban view.
I can be pretty thick sometimes but I _am_ smart enough to be able to change views in task tracking software ;-). If Linear supports disabling cycles then that's a new development... when we tried we had two others plus myself look at it and it simply wasn't an available option. Whether this was due to us not having a feature flag turned on or the wrong tier plan or what I can't say. Their method [1] specifically speaks to being rigid and working in cycles so I'm inclined to believe that this is a semi-recent change.
Haha sorry, I didn't mean to insinuate that. It's a tiny button though and not obvious. Was just taking a guess because it can be easy to miss and some of our users did at first.
I first opened my personal Linear account in 2020 and the default was no Cycles. I created a new team in that account today and it's the default.
I opened new one somewhat recently (2 months ago) for my company and the default was to have them off too.
Strongly agree with this one. If you can move do it now. It only becomes dramatically harder to move away from Jira as time goes on.
Linear is essentially a mildly opinionated and hyper fast version of Jira. It will be immediately familiar to anyone coming from Jira, which is a really great thing for adoption.
Don't underestimate the speed feature. The effect here has been that people stop using Jira and only use it at a bare minimum as required by management. People end up moving all of their planning and notes to things like Google Sheets, random docs, or just Apple Notes. Linear is so fast and easy to use I found I was back to doing planning and notes live in the tool because it was easier.
Highly recommend you give it a try. My company is unfortunately already heavily entrenched in Jira and I found a vast amount of work to move us all so I had to abandon our move.
