Trying Tryton

Posted Dec 6, 2017 9:26 UTC (Wed) by shiftee (subscriber, #110711)
Parent article: Trying Tryton

I came across Tryton when reading about GNU Health (http://health.gnu.org).
I installed the Ubuntu packages and accessed the GNU Health demo database.
If I remember correctly the Ubuntu 16.04 version was too old to access the database but the version in 17.04 worked nicely

Trying Tryton

Posted Dec 7, 2017 4:09 UTC (Thu) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link] (5 responses)

I imagine Tryton would work better in Debian or Ubuntu. Too bad the author ran out of time or interest to try it there.

Trying Tryton

Posted Dec 7, 2017 15:32 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

I can fully believe it might work better on a different platform. I didn't have a Debian box handy to try it on, but it doesn't matter: I'd seen enough to understand that Tryton, for all its virtues, was not intended for the use case at hand.

Trying Tryton

Posted Dec 7, 2017 21:45 UTC (Thu) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for continuing your series about free software business accounting!

Without knowing much about Tryton, I have the feeling, that the review does it a little bit of injustice. There is a use case, i.e. "SMB accounting", but it is clear from the beginning, that both Tryton and Odoo are business application platforms, not applications. If I understand correctly, such systems are always a kind of workbench. That is the whole business case for thousands SAP and Oracle consulting companies. I'm clearly not an expert on those things, but I would try GnuCash (what you did), LedgerSMB, and PostBooks. At least from their short description they look more like applications, not platforms, to me.

Anyway, an interesting read!

PS: It seems, that Debian unstable has relatively recent version of all mentioned programs, but Odoo.

Trying Tryton

Posted Dec 7, 2017 21:48 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Indeed, I tried to carefully express that Tryton isn't "bad", it's just not aimed at this use case.

Odoo, FWIW, is more oriented toward the small-business accounting use case. It has a lot of features missing for commercial reasons, but a real effort has been made to have it work out of the box and be reasonably easy to work with.

Trying Tryton

Posted Dec 14, 2017 16:10 UTC (Thu) by saxa (guest, #30413) [Link] (1 responses)

>> I imagine Tryton would work better in Debian or Ubuntu. Too bad the author ran out of time or interest to try it there.

I think that LWN is looking for something working right out of the box, at least minimally. Now I would assume as they wrote that no user would try to install another distro just to have a software working better. It is not very well thought if you think it that way.

Trying Tryton

Posted Dec 14, 2017 16:13 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Installation isn't an issue; I don't think that software should be judged based on whether there's a convenient package available for a specific distribution. The real problem is that, even working perfectly out of the box, Tryton isn't aimed at the use case in question.