Re: [PLUG] Quicken alternative?

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 3:15 AM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:

As I'm moving my wife over to Ubuntu, 2 of the problems are going to be
Quicken and TurboTax. I'll keep a VM for TT, but Quicken is more of a
day-to-day issue.

I hate Quicken anyway, since they deliberately break stuff every few
years to force you to buy an upgrade you don't need. I refuse to do
that, so we're still using Quicken 2003. But my wife would like to be
able to download transactions, which is one feature they break on
purpose. I just noticed I had Quicken 2006 CD's laying around, but they
just broke that in the middle of 2009. 3 years to EoL is not acceptable.

For now, Quicken 2003 runs flawlessly under Wine on Hardy (using the
updated PPA Wine).

She wants to be able to download stuff, and we need something that can
print checks, since we still do a lot of that. And I'd prefer
cross-platform, just in case she has to go back to Windows (hope not,
but...). I also want something that is not full of bugs and is actually
maintained and supported.

I've looked at GNUCash and I like it, except it can't print more than a
single check at a time, which is a show stopper for us. (LONG-standing
bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=328936)

KMyMoney is useless since it can't download or print checks at all. Not
sure I'd call it cross-platform either.

Grisbi is a 0.x.x version, and does not look well maintained.

That leaves MoneyDance, which is Java (yuck), and neither free nor open
source (yuck^2). But it is cross-platform, supported, and supposedly
does everything I need. I haven't gotten downloading to work yet, and I
think the interface is a tad ugly (and to be uglier than a GNU GUI app
like GNUCash is saying something). But it might work, though I'm
slightly worried about getting on another upgrade treadmill.

What is everyone else doing (besides not printing checks anymore, yeah,
yeah, I know...)? Any other clues?

Thanks,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
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