I have shipped on Jira, Linear, and a homegrown stack of five tools held together with hope. People ask me which one to pick, and the honest answer is that the question is usually wrong. You are not choosing a tracker. You are choosing how much of your delivery context is allowed to fall on the floor between tools. Let me make the real tradeoff visible, including where I would tell you to pick the competitor.
Where Linear genuinely wins
If you need world-class issue tracking and not much else, Linear is the best at it, and it is not close. The keyboard-first UX, the speed, the opinionated simplicity. Their mobile app is more mature than most of the market. For an engineering-only team that wants to track work and nothing more, Linear is a fine and possibly correct choice. I will not pretend otherwise.
Where it leaves you is everything that is not an issue. Your architecture decisions live somewhere else. Your test coverage lives somewhere else. Your docs go stale in a third place. Linear is excellent at the box it draws and silent about everything outside it.
Where Jira genuinely wins
