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Our Blogs The BeerFiles Intuit slow on Quicken and Quickbooks for Linux
Our Blogs The BeerFiles Intuit slow on Quicken and Quickbooks for Linux | Intuit slow on Quicken and Quickbooks for Linux |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Sunday, 11 November 2007 | |
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Page 3 of 4 The following Intuit representative attempts to justify why the company has ignored the Linux desktop. "Welcome to the Linux forum. You make some good points, and I'll pass them along to the right people. There would be significant challenges in porting the whole codebase over to Linux, and it would have to be worth the effort. For now, the share of Linux on the desktop is still small : Featured Whitepaper
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Another small business user cited sources that indicated that the Linux desktop market share is actually an order of magnitude greater than source quoted by the Intuit rep. OK Intuit, we get the message - it's all too much trouble to do a Linux desktop port for Quicken and Quickbooks. You're happy to let someone else get a foothold in the fast growing Linux desktop market, perhaps believing that you can elbow your way in at a later date. So what's available for Linux users that cant wait for you? Looking first at Quicken, which is a personal financial manager that targets consumers, the initial product that springs to mind is Moneydance 2007 from Reilly Technologies. This is not a free product but it only costs US$30 and it is available on Linux, as well as Windows and Mac. Isn't it amazing that a small company can develop a consumer product for all three platforms, while a comparative giant like Intuit can't? Moneydance 2007 has been described as very user friendly, providing similar functionality to Quicken and capable of importing Quicken QIF files. There are also plenty of good reviews of Moneydance 2007 running on Linux distros, including my distro Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. However, I found my first attempts at downloading a trial version stymied by a shell scripting error. Fortunately, plenty of others had the same issue and I found a quick and easy answer on the Ubuntu Forum here through Google. It did involve typing two short lines in the Terminal and, although I've already lost my fear of that, Reilly may well take note that this should be fixed. Anyway, upon loading the free trial version of Moneydance 2007, which is restricted to 100 transactions, I found myself looking at a very smooth and professional looking personal finances manager that is simplicity itself to use. I've only just started looking through it but from what I've seen, if you're looking for a Linux replacement candidate for Quicken this could very well be it. It doesn't cost anything to download a trial version and it takes about a minute to install bearing in mind the minor problem outlined above. So what other financial software goodies are there available for the Linux desktop user? As it turns out, plenty. |
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