[jFriedensreich]

linear is no alternative whatsoever, we state what a project tracker needs to have on the linked page. Part of why i became obsessed with pivotal tracker is that i had to work with linear in a startup and it was so horrible in comparison to tracker.

[slashdev]

What are the main things missing?

[jFriedensreich]

Thats the wrong question in the first place. Its impossible for something like linear to replace pivotal tracker because part of the appeal of a project tracker is that there is only one view that everyone shares and lives in. If you have different boards and table views and filters and settings a project manager can preset you can never reach this by adding more stuff. As i said before i added a concise list trying to define what a project tracker needs in the hero section of bye-tracker.net If this is not clear i would love to improve it so please share what does not click. I am not 100% sure yet if you need to experience it before its clear or if this is something fully understandable by reading about it.

[derefr]

This sounds like someone saying that C++ can't replace C on a given project because it has too many features and nobody can agree on which ones should be used.

You do realize that any given organization using the tool can just... write a standards document specifying how the tool is (and more importantly, isn't) expected to be used within the org?

[jFriedensreich]

I am talking about user experience not features. What you are saying is you can get the user experience of using a mac by only using the subset of features a mac has on a windows machine, it just does not work this way. Sure there exists a theoretical pm tool that is a superset of a project tracker that could be made to work by not using features but linear is certainly not that.

[derefr]

> Sure there exists a theoretical pm tool that is a superset of a project tracker that could be made to work by not using features but linear is certainly not that.

Well, to clarify, then, I think that's exactly what the GP was asking: "what's missing from Linear to make it a superset of a project tracker — where there's some particular view you could point your PMs to and tell them to use that view as the project tracker?"

That being said. While I've never used either myself (my only experience with PM tools is with Trello and ClickUp.) I get the impression that the answer to that question is something like the following:

> Pivotal is a project tracker. A project tracker — at least in Pivotal's case — can be understood to be a highly opinionated version of a kanban-board tool, which encodes a lot of domain-knowledge about how an Agile process is supposed to be done. Doing your project management through a project-tracker tool, thus constrains your project-management process to follow best principles that keep your project from falling into certain common failure modes.

> Linear isn't opinionated. Rather, it's a Jira-like "describe how your company's workflow should into the app one CRUD object at a time" tool. Linear might have a kanban-like UI in it somewhere, but that UI doesn't "think of itself" as being "for" Agile; it's "for" whatever the org wants to use it for.

> The axis on which Pivotal can be considered a better workflow tool vs. a plain virtual-kanban-board like Trello, is the same axis on which an online board game can be considered a better "gameplay experience" than a plain virtual-shared-tabletop app where you've loaded in the assets of that board game: the Pivotal, like the online board game, enforces the rules you want to be playing by.

> Linear does not enforce any kind of rules by default; and although it's possible to "teach" it some kinds of rules (mostly in the relationships between types-of-nodes), it's impossible to encode the sort of constraint-type rules that an Agile process is built on, into it. Thus, on the axis on which Pivotal's goodness is measured, Linear offers nothing.

[jFriedensreich]

> "Well, to clarify, then, I think that's exactly what the GP was asking: "what's missing from Linear to make it a superset of a project tracker — where there's some particular view you could point your PMs to and tell them to use that view as the project tracker?" "

ok but that would mean creating a complete project tracker view as a subview in linear or recreating linear as a project tracker tool and then adding the features not part of a project tracker back in an non obstrusive way. Both are not feasible for linear to do.

> "and be understood to be a highly opinionated version of a kanban-board tool"

no they are fundamentally different abstractions i think this is part of the misunderstanding. a kanban board maps story state to swimlanes and you pull tickets through lanes/ states with your workflow. a project tracker keeps the relative position of stories for most state transitions eg. stories don't move if they transition from finished to delivered. the lanes in a project tracker are an abstaction level above story state.