[GNC] GNUCash becoming unusable ..v3.4

[Diane Trefethen]

I am trying to decide how to proceed with my accounting software. I have 
been using Quicken since DOS v2. Back then, if you encountered a 
problem, you could go over to Intuit in Menlo Park and there’d always be 
an engineer happy to talk with you. They also had free phone advise for 
a few hours, more than enough to get a newbie up and going. At about the 
same time Intuit moved their headquarters to Arizona (I think it was 
AZ), they replaced their original business model which was to provide a 
straightforward, user-friendly, virtually bug-free personal bookkeeping 
program. They switched to the Microsoft Model which is to “upgrade” with 
superfluous “features” and simultaneously introduce lots of bugs so 
customers who upgraded to the “new improved version” would be locked 
into an endless cycle of upgrading to get bugs fixed AND simultaneously 
acquire new bugs. Ain’t greed great :(

Then my hard drive died and I decided to replace it, sort of, with a 
Raspberry Pi and take the plunge into the world of Linux. I had wanted 
to learn more about Unix since the late 70s and here was a golden 
opportunity to do just that. As my chits built up, I turned to the well 
thought of GnuCash, only to discover that it is a mess. It’s one thing 
to have a program that is DESIGNED to use specific outside utilities, 
which fact is then fully and accurately documented. It is quite another 
to have a program so buggy that the end user needs to go out and FIND 
the right 3rd party programs to make it run well, for a while, sort of. 
In short, GnuCash is about where Quicken was when Intuit dumped it. 
Buggy, unfriendly, and failing at trying to be all things to all users.

I suggest that you Gnu folks do what Intuit did originally. Make a 
simple to use, bug-free personal bookkeeping program. [Maybe the rights 
to the original DOS and early Windows versions of Quicken are now free 
or could be gotten inexpensively and you could build on those 
platforms.] AFTER you get a program that works almost flawlessly, THEN 
create modules that can either be incorporated into or dynamically 
linked to the main program. Simultaneously, continue to help newbies who 
want just the bookkeeping program and nothing else. What I can see from 
the short time I’ve been in this group and reading the emails is that 
GnuCash is basically flawed and fixing those flaws is a game of 
Whack-a-Mole with each whack creating new software conflicts. When your 
great idea just needs a tweak or two, you tweak. When your idea needs 
fixes that look like a dog chasing its tail, you go back to the drawing 
board.

Instead of fighting with GnuCash, I think that I’ll try to figure a way 
to install an old DOS version of Quicken on my Pi. Aside from getting a 
program that is clean and easy to use, it’ll be fun to re-visit the 
Easter Eggs.