jazzychad.notes - Linear IssuesLinear Issues<br>6/22/2026, 4:03:43 PM<br>Disclaimer: NONE of the words of this post were generated with AI. Everything was hand-typed using human time, brain cycles, and heartbeats.

Ok, look. I'm care-mad. I have been using Linear a lot while developing my upcoming app, NeoCam (a retro pixel art camera). I am writing this post because a Linear employee reached out to me for specific feedback when I posted the following tweet.

I honestly think Linear is pretty great. But there are so many little broken windows and bugs that make me not really enjoy using it day to day.

I am an ex-Apple engineer. Which means nothing, except to signify that I have years of experience with the world's greatest bug and issue tracking system of all time: Radar.

I know from the outside that Radar seems like a black hole where 3rd party developers sometimes file bugs and never get any reply, but inside the company it is a completely different story. Everything runs on Radar. The employees, from engineers to EPMs to designers, use it all day every day. If it's not in Radar, it doesn't exist.

All this to say, I think I have learned what makes great issue tracking software.

I interviewed for the iOS position at Linear a few years ago. Did I think that having someone on the team that had industry experience with industry-leading issue tracking software and 15 years of iOS development experience would be a benefit to Linear? Yes. Did they hire me? No.

In the end I think we both dodged a bullet because it felt like there was not a culture fit, in both directions.

Since there is no public version of Radar, Linear has been the next best thing, and I have very excitedly told many of my engineering friends this! But just to give some perspective, here is how I would rank all existing issue trackers:

Radar: A+

Linear: C-

Literally everything else: F-----

So really, Linear is still so far ahead, but there is so much more headroom.

What follows is a list of "grievances" (for lack of a better word). Do I think anything will change because of this post? I don't know. But since I have Linear's ear, I thought I would lay it all out there... because, again, I really do care.

Network Issues

I have been seeing this error alert very frequently in the app lately.

Attachments

The way attachments are handled in Linear is atrocious on many fronts.

Attachments can be attached to:

The main issue description

Any comment in the issue thread

Any reply in the issue thread

Images are treated specially and display fully inline after being uploaded as an attachment. This may be aesthetically pleasing, but it is not very useful in practice. If I upload multiple screenshots of an issue I'm having, I now have to scroll past all of them every time I view the issue or interact with any of the controls below the issue description.

I appreciate that on the web I can use the grabbers to shrink the images to the smallest possible width, but this still creates a one-column stack with a bunch of wasted space to scroll past.

There is no such shrinking affordance on the iOS app.

The iOS app can't view text file attachments. It bounces me to Safari to login to the linear.app website. I just won't put in that much effort.

When developing serious software, there may be issues that have dozens of attachments like screenshots, voice notes, screen recordings, log files, design files, 3d models, zip files, or any number of other files.

There needs to be a unified Attachments View for an issue where every single attached file is listed and can be easily viewed or downloaded. Having all the attachments strewn about an issue in one of several places is crazy making. I would be ok with the current situation (attachments everywhere) if there was also a unified location to view them all and if images were treated as regular file attachments (they could even show a small thumbnail if desired).

iOS Drag and Drop bugs

Speaking of attachments...

I was running through my app on my iPad and noticed several UI polish issues. I wanted to upload the screenshots to the Linear issues I created. I would prefer to use drag-and-drop on iPad instead of using the system picker UI inside Linear (not Linear's fault; Apple's implementation of the photo picker on iPad is pretty bad (too small, hard to navigate, etc)).

I setup the Photos and Linear app side by side:

I initiate the drag of the image from Photos app:

I position the drop over the comment text field:

I drop the image and it appears correctly in the text field:

I send the comment, and the image appears as a large gray box:

This isn't just a rendering bug, after loading the issue on the iPhone app, the gray box remains:

And web is stuck in this state:

or eventually:

(For what it's worth, dragging and dropping an image into a comment box in the web app works properly).

Issue prefixes are a mess

I am very opinionated about this topic. Linear are also very opinionated about this topic....