This issue is taken from SpongePowered/SpongeAPI#2275 (comment)

LinearComponents.linear() is clearly designed to ease the burden of creating a tree like structure, but is hindered by the fact that it's not obvious what it is, why it's there, how it works. The documentation says this:

which tells me nothing about it and devalues the existence of the function. Until recently, I was under the impression that it was mostly to be used to effectively join multiple components together - however, based on recent conversations, it actually aspires that it can be used for more than that - like including colours and styles. I have no idea how that works - does it work like Sponge API 7's Text.of() when it comes to colours and styles?

It's also not a particularly descriptive name: to most people it's not going to be obvious that "linear" components means the same as this Text.of(...) - people I know only know of it because I told them about it (and even then, I should just use a join method)! It might be better on the Component interface - but it certainly needs fleshing out in terms of documentation and what it can do.