A couple of years ago I spent a considerable amount of time trying out both GnuCash and HomeBank.
This isn’t the first time I was asked why I don’t use GNUCash. I felt like I needed an accounting class to understand it. It was a non-starter for me. I just couldn’t figure out how to get it up and running. There’s too much on the screen that’s unrelated to my task at hand, which was to track a simple checking account. I had to hunt through lists of crap that I didn’t understand why it was there. It was just too complicated. I mean, even the startup wizard was made backwards, who puts the Next button to the left of the Back button? I had trouble getting through to the end because I kept pressing the back button when I wanted to go forward.
I actually used HomeBank for a couple months, but ultimately it was too rudimentary.
Quicken is the Goldilocks product. Not too complex, not too simple. It does a lot, is very good at what it does, and I don’t mind paying for that. I only wish they had a Linux version.