"linear progress" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when you want to talk about a steady, consistent rate of advancement either in terms of achievement or development. For example: "Our software development team has made remarkable linear progress since the beginning of the year."
This has never been a linear progress.
But maybe pop's narrative isn't a simple one of linear progress or decline.
Runners, rowers and cyclists have a linear progress; they know where it's going.
Health used to make linear progress, but "it has become an exponential technology".
But these are people shaken from the linear progress of time.
In linear progress, after thirty iterations you've advanced thirty steps; in exponential progress, you've advanced 1.07 billion steps.
In religions and cultures that conceive of time as linear, progressing from a beginning toward an end time, when the whole cosmos will be renewed or changed, people understand their status (i.e., origin, identity, and destiny) in relationship to particular events in history that have a significance similar to those expressed in the myths of people who view time as cyclical.
So recovery is assumed to be linear, progressing at a fixed rate per year.
With his idea of the development of spirit in history, Hegel is seen as literalising a way of talking about different cultures in terms of their spirits, of constructing a developmental sequence of epochs typical of nineteenth-century ideas of linear historical progress, and then enveloping this story of human progress in terms of one about the developing self-conscious of the cosmos-God itself.
[But even that is] still linear — you progress through the class through a sort of a syllabus.
We reject the deep premise of modern Western historians that social time is either linear (continuous progress or decline) or chaotic (too complex to reveal any direction).
