Early days’ Trello was the best project tracking experience by far.
Whatever they did to market the product worked amazingly well, because I see it being suggested all the time even by people who haven’t used it! Their marketing has established it as the fast alternative, so every complaint about slow project management elicits a suggestion from someone to try Linear. Then you ask them about their own experience with Linear and either they haven’t used it or didn’t use it for more than a few hours on a side project.
Not-JIRA + dark mode + usable APIs will take you far.
Linear was really, incredibly fast. We adopted it in 2021 and it was amazing.
Now it’s bloated. That’s the standard path for most software (Zawinski’s Law), and I’m not very excited when they ship another feature. Most of the new stuff isn’t for small players, they’re more of an alternative for medium and large businesses.
The Atlassian shared hosting one is a nightmare.
They keep adding new features at a steady pace, each slowly making the UI more confusing.
The core issue isn't hard so I built my own, native OIDC auth, status, comments, plus I made communication a first class citizen, tracked it its own status workflow. Another nice thing I like is that status has attached a workflow that associates actions with a status transitions and task screens are defined in data. All APIs go through a single endpoint that can be intrinsically combined into batches. Still fast. It isn't that great, but I like it so much better then any of these commercial offerings.
I'd get 10+ tabs all stuck in a "loading" state, and even force-reloading wouldn't make their contents match the address-bar.