Financial Services Software for Linux?

Shakrai asks: "I find myself in the process of building a new computer system and at a crossroads for what OS to put on it. I have used Linux for years as a server for my home network and as a workstation dual booting with Windows. I have find myself unable to get away from Windows entirely because of the large amount of older games that I retain and still like to play. Nevertheless I am less then eager to pony up $80-$200 for a Windows license for my new box and I figure that I can learn to live without most of the Windows games that I enjoy. There still seems to be one stumbling block before I could totally abandon Windows though: Financial Services Software. For the last six years I have been quite the avid user of Quicken. Every single investment and transaction that I have ever made resides in Quicken. Is there a package for Linux out there that even remotely provides the same functionality?" "I don't really use Quicken's online services (why pay for something my credit union gives me for free) but I pretty much use every other function of the product (tax estimation, investment tracking, reports, etc). Is this going to keep me stuck in Windows land? Short of writing my own replacement for Quicken (not very likely) what are my options?"

Comments

Review at LWN

[greppling]

LWN (Linux Weekly News) has just done a review of personal finance managers for Linux: http://lwn.net/Articles/149383/ (It will become freely available this thursday.)

The main alternatives are GnuCash and KMyMoney.

Get a Mac

[MBCook]

Get a Mac.

Not what you were looking for, but consider it. You can run open source software on it, you can even run Linux on it. Most of the big games get ported eventually. Best of all, it has Quicken (which I use myself) and other big name software (including an excellent version of Office). You won't have to re-enter all your data (as another poster talked about), you can just import it.

Seriously, give it a try for a while. It's too bad Apple removed that 30 day free trial of a Mac Mini.

Not willing to go Mac? Can you run Quicken (maybe an older version) well in Wine? What about running VMWare or Bochs and running it inside Windows in there? You don't need the performance so it should be quite useable.

LWN Article, Wait a Week to Read

[MBCook]

Linux Weekly News (an excellent place, you should support them) just did part one of The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Personal Finance Managers. I don't think it is available to non-subscribers yet, but it should be on Thursday then you can take a look at it. It gives an overview of all the current offerings and setting them up and such. I'll put up the last paragraph here because it has a simple sum-up and tells you what's coming in part two:

Your editor's final comment is this: for many years, there was only one free personal finance application of any note: GnuCash. It is now interesting to see there are three viable programs out there. The situation has changed significantly - for the better - over the past year. Come back for the second part (to be published, probably, near the beginning of October) to complete the tour of what these programs can do, and a final recommendation from the editor.

You're question is quite timely, actually.