It's been a little over a month now since I made the switch away from Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Money to begin using Ubuntu Linux and GnuCash to manage my personal finances. I thought this would be a good time to give you an update on my progress and overall happiness level with my decision.

In all I have to say I remain pretty happy with the move. Getting over first impressions and becoming a more habitual user has led me to look for some of the less used features, and that's opened my eyes a little wider. One particular eye opening experience I wanted to tell you about happened when I sold my first lot of stock last month.

Clumsy as it is, Microsoft Money has a feature that let me identify which shares of stock I sold. It's a very useful thing to have when you're trying to manage the overall level of capital gains you'll report to the IRS. Unfortunately gnucash has nothing resembling this feature in operation at this time.

Gnucash does offer a lot tracking dialog box. It appears to be the start of something good. Unfortunately it's not implemented. According to the users and developers on the gnucash mail list, it was a sub-project which died part way through. Worse, using that partially implemented dialog box can damage your data. OK then, we won't be going there again any time soon.

It's a big drawback but it's not a deal killer. I actually have a preference for seeing my portfolio in my own spreadsheet presentation anyway. Tracking lots this way is an extra bother, but I know my data's good and I always know where it is. I can get past this one huge drawback given all the goodness I've found in gnucash elsewhere.

Read my previous entries about http://www.myinvestmentblog.com/gnucash