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Comment by HoyaSaxa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Linear has become the thing it sought to kill - complex.

It's really the only way for companies to survive and go up market, unfortunately.

The only way for companies _that raise nine figures chasing decacorn status_ to survive

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.

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.

I share your sentiment, not to say that Linear is bad, just that I don't see it as good UX or fast.

I'm also in the same boat, I struggle with the UX and get lost frequently.

I would still say that it's the only SPA I've ever experienced which I'd call "acceptable" and that says a lot on what you need to consider when picking a new stack.

I've never associated it with speed either due to UI. It's not slow, and it does feel snappy compared to some of the older alternatives but it's never felt particularly fast. Granted, we don't use it as much anymore.

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.

Yeah, agreed. We need another word for that. Literally everybody in the industry is affected by this.

Typically it goes like this: you make a good UI that users like and release your product. The product manager gets rightfully promoted and starts working on other stuff.

A new manager comes in, and they can't really do much. The UI is already close to perfect, after all. So they do a major UI overhaul that inevitably removes/hides functionality and makes things worse.

This pretty much sounds like the result of AI coding. No - I am not being facetious. This is exactly how AI generates websites like an unergonomic stamp quite contrary to a way an experienced CSS/UX designer would do.

Somehow the web-sites AI generates and the websites an experienced human manually creates are very different.

God it’s awful. I had to get a colleague to show me how to add a due date to an item because it’s hidden in the nav pane. It’s better than Jira, but that’s a very low bar.

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