Question

Are there plans to release a desktop TurboTax for Linux, in particular Ubuntu, for the 2024 tax year?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
October 6, 2024
2 replies
0 views

For years I kept Windows on an old laptop for the sole purpose of running TT. I have repurposed that laptop to run Ubuntu, as I did with my other former macOS computer. It seems like a relatively small investment by Intuit to capture the Linux users market.

TurboTax Online

A

Anonymous_

Employee

No text available

fanfare

Employee

"small investment"

Windows programs don't run on Linux.

@kak3

M

Mike9241

probably a relatively large investment considering the % of desktop PCs that use any version of Linux.

https://itsfoss.com/linux-market-share/#:~:text=Statista%20%28last%20updated%20on%20Jan.%202023%29%3A%20The%20Linux,to%2014.55%25%20for%20macOS%2C%20and%2070.39%25%20for%20Windows.

Not only are there the costs of writing the program code but then also the costs of the support staff that would be needed. Intuit doesn't even produce a desktop version of Turbotax Business for MAC - currently only a Windows version

L

llondel

Too late for 2024, but they should seriously consider it for 2025 because all those Windows 10 PCs will be out of support. I suspect a lot of home users will decline to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11, and quite a few may well migrate to Linux. It's a catch-22 because corporations like Intuit won't produce Linux versions because there's no perceived market, and people won't migrate away from Windows because the apps won't run on Linux, so nothing ever changes.

At the moment I use a Windows 10 VM under Linux for TurboTax on a PC that is 11 years old and still working just fine, but I assume at some point TurboTax will insist on Windows 11 to run and I'll be off to look at what options are available for Linux rather than buy hardware I don't need. I can see that whichever tax software company caters for people like me is likely to inherit a lot of users from the other companies if they drag their feet.

With the advent of Flatpak and Snap for Linux, the entire thing can be packaged as a single file to download and run without worrying as much about which flavour of Linux is being used.