I’m conflicted about Linear’s progression. I dislike some of the features but on the whole they’ve managed to keep the software pleasant to use, it doesn’t feel to me that it is drifting towards Jira territory, rather, it feels like it is losing the carefully considered product design because now code is cheap to generate. I’m not worried about it turning into Jira but it has lost its soul. Still a great product.

All software becomes popular because it's not the old behemoth, but it's new, fast, and simple. All software then grows and grows until it becomes the new behemoth, and the circle of life begins anew.

How could it be different?

Linear is essentially a small subset of Jira.

It's liked and works because it's simpler and covers most of the needs of teams without huge need of defining their own processes.

But be in business long enough and you find out that appealing to small teams and small orgs that don't require flexible and custom process definition doesn't make enough money and doesn't grow you forever.

So they will keep eventually growing in features and flexibility till they cover the reason Jira is so successful: it is more powerful and adaptable.

I'm no fan of Jira, but I've tried and seen enough of these tools to understand why it has the success that it has.

This is even more clear when you go beyond software development and need processes for teams like sales, HR, legal, etc. Jira can fit all of them.

Linear? It's a joke.