A free alternative to Quickbooks, at least for techies

I have been neglecting accounting for quite a while now. My wife and I have recently started two new businesses that will need two new accounting setups ... this was going to be too expensive with Quickbooks, which was charging us $80+ per month for two companies.

I tried Zoho, an Indian alternative that's listed at $9 per company per month ... but it seemed clunky and I wanted to find something else.

I wound up with LedgerSMB:

After using it for a day, I can see it as something I can make work for my businesses ... and my non-tech-capable wife. But do keep in mind:

1. It's a Linux thing; some of the documents say "If you get this working on Windows please let us know how you did it." It's supposed to work on Mac too, but I didn't try that. I installed it on a little Mint Linux machine I've had on my home network since last year, and that worked (mostly) fine.
2. There is a partial Docker setup which for those who are more Docker-capable than I am currently might be just the ticket. But for some reason they don't include Postgres in their Docker setup but require you to do that separately.
3. So I used the "quick install guide" ... which took most of an entire day. The programming language is Perl and there are a lot of Perl modules to install. The two Dumb Problems I had to overcome were:

• They recommend the "fast Perl web" thing Starman ... but the configuration file that runs it specified /usr/bin/starman when it was really /usr/local/bin/starman.
• They have a suggested setup with Starman reverse proxying to a web server: Apache or Nginx.
• I picked Nginx ... then they have this suggestion for Let's Encrypt, a free SSL cert setup from eff.org ... I tried that and used the "automatic Nginx" option that seemed to work. But when I tried to connect to the server via https, it didn't work. On investigation I found that the Let's Encrypt certbot does not work on a private IP address (as I use on my home network) ... and there is no error message saying that ... I eventually realized I just needed to do the self-signed certificate trick, and that was the last step getting it to work.

Usage requires more accounting knowledge than does Quickbooks; you need to know what account to debit and what to credit, for example. But there is a templating system to set up common transactions to be reused.

More details as I know more, but so far so good!