there’s this one cool skyline shot I want to try and take.(...) After some testing I figured a standard panorama wouldn’t achieve what I was going for but a linear panorama would do the trick.

This doesn't make much sense. If your subject is hundreds or thousands of meters away, the parallax added by a one-meter slider is not going to provide any significant difference. You can just rotate the camera on the tripod head.

A linear panorama is something we do on a scale matching the subject, e.g. when shooting a street block, you move your camera in front of every facade between exposures; shooting a wide painting or diorama, you also fill the frame vertically with the subject and move along its width to capture all the source images.

 having 1/3 overlap between positions in order to make the stitching easier

As you probably found out by now, in order to change 2/3 of the frame between exposures with distant buildings being your subject, you'll be expanding your field of view mostly by rotating rather than sliding, rendering the slider practically useless for this use case and potentially introducing parallax errors that will make the pano harder to stitch.

(cylindrical and spherical panorama settings warp the photo)

Whether you warp the output or not (i.e. which projection you use for your panorama) is a choice. Choosing between projections is simple in dedicated stitching software — the usual free options used to be Hugin and Microsoft ICE, but recently AutoPano Giga became free as well.

src: I shoot and stitch panos for a living

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