[GNC] GNUCash becoming unusable ..v3.4

[Stephen M. Butler]

Your mileage is different than mine.  I'm not seeing that many problems
for basic personal accounting.  And the folks here have been very helpful.


On 2/1/19 11:56 AM, Diane Trefethen wrote:
> 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.
>
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-- 
Stephen M Butler, PMP, PSM
Stephen.M.Butler51 at gmail.com
kg7je at arrl.net
253-350-0166
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