[GNC] GNUCash becoming unusable ..v3.4

[Adrien Monteleone]

Diane,

The dev team has at various times acknowledged the current state of the app isn’t where they would like it. But you can’t just jump from A to Z. They have a roadmap to get there and it takes time and people that aren’t in infinite supply. Some ‘upgrades’ aren’t really up to them either. As the project (like most these days) depends on other projects, they have to move along with those dependencies, all the while trying to re-write the base app. This will always introduce new bugs. There’s no real way around this short of trying to take over support for those older dependencies, which stretches their limited resources even further.

I’m not sure what 3rd party tools you are referring to. I’ve been using GnuCash for 6 years all by itself. I’ve used it for personal and business finances.

There have been some bugs along the way, but generally, any real difficulty I’ve had was due to my own misunderstanding. Once that was fixed, life improved.

If GnuCash isn’t to your tastes or doesn’t meet your needs, then by all means, use something else. If you decide to stay, many here are willing to help.

Trying to get a DOS app to run on the Pi would be quite an adventure, very likely taking more time than wrestling GnuCash to your liking. You might consider looking into ledger-cli. It’s as simple and easy as you can get while still having some financial discipline. It won’t meet every need, but it will get the basic job done of keeping track of finances. And it won’t require hoops to jump through to get it to run on the Pi. It’s more a ‘method’ or ‘workflow' than an app, somewhat similar to todo.txt


Regards,
Adrien


> On Feb 1, 2019, at 1:56 PM, Diane Trefethen <dt-gn at wakerobinranch.com> 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.