GnuCash for Windows available after 10 years in UNIX

The GNU way to manage your money!GnuCash team has been famous in the past for their harshness towards anything “Windows”. No wonder – the 1st version of GC was written in 1997 in Motif for X Window System which was (and still is?) light years ahead of substandard Microsoft Windows GUI in terms of professional usability.

It seemed nobody expected them (GnuCash) to release a Windows port. Me wasn’t exception either. So when I had to move from X to MS Windows I also had to keep a subsidiary UNIX machine (thank God, virtual computer was OK) special for UNIX applications, most notably for GnuCash.

I didn’t mind going with the burden of an extra computer, because GnuCash is a solid personal and small-business financial accounting package offering lots of useful features like ease of use, powerful reporting and general reliability.
Or how would you like the freedom to export your data to move to whatever system you’d prefer? In most commercial “alternatives”, you often find yourself locked with your data to a particular software vendor.

Times change and the year of 2007 was a turning point in Gnu Cash history as GnuCash has been ported to the Microsoft Windows OS.
(GnuCash for Mac OS X has been available for quite some time already.)

This is really a good move. Meaning to show people in the Windows world [just a tip of the iceberg of] what they’ve been missing out all these years.

For me it is good also: now I can consolidate all my personal files in a dedicated place (which is “precious” – needs to be protected from snoopers, natural and other disasters). That’s one encrypted drive less.

You can go right now and download precompiled binary of GnuCash for Windows XP, 2000 and Windows Vista. Beware though, this piece of software is no toy – the distribution weighs 50 MB.

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5 thoughts on “GnuCash for Windows available after 10 years in UNIX

  1. “GnuCash team has been famous in the past for their harshness towards anything “Windows”.”

    I can’t think of any reason you’d believe this … can you provide some evidence of such “harshness”?

    > Motif for X Window System which was (and still is?) light years ahead of
    > substandard Microsoft Windows GUI in terms of professional usability.

    This is really not true.

  2. Here:
    http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-user/2004-December/012303.html
    Derek Atkins speaking:

    None of the current developers care about Windows, so we have no plans
    or intentions of implementing a windows port ourselves.

    OK, probably I was a little harsh myself when trying to recall the past state of things.
    However, I guess the change is pretty big and deserves a non-neutral post of some sort in a blog 😉

    Anyway, sorry if I offended somebody.
    ____

    About Motif:
    may be it’s no competitor to Windows in offering fancy modern video effects or something really quirky, but it’s no doubt superior when it comes to controlling every square inch of screen’s real estate and squeezing all the efficiency possible from every stroke of a mouse – that’s what pros value, I think.

  3. Nope, no offense taken. But don’t mistake apathy towards windows with “harshness”.

    Re: Motif: … hmm. Flashy, cute window effects have a low signal/noise ratio indeed … that’s true of both Aero’s transparency and the Compviz window-wobble effects, imho. As for controlling “every square inch” … one can control every pixel of a window in any environment … one could write a whole custom widget library … but , that’s a waste of time, and why we have widget toolkits. And on that front, motif died a looong time ago, when Gtk and Qt came along … and they were in response to how much *better* the widget toolkits were on Windows and Mac.

    As for mouse stroke efficiency … well. It’s hard to construct a scenario where that’s a concern.

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