Intuit slow on Quicken and Quickbooks for Linux

By Stan Beer
Sunday, 11 November 2007 10:56

Opinion and Analysis

Linux desktop users looking for good financial software to run natively can forget about Quicken and Quickbooks. One glance at Intuit's website should be enough to convince even devout users of that company's products that despite Quickbooks for Linux servers showing strong growth, a port to Linux desktops is a long way off and a Linux version of Quicken is not even on the radar. So what are the alternatives?

Well Quicken and Quickbooks users could continue to run their financial software on Windows using a dual boot machine. Or they could use a Windows compatibility layer or virtual machine solution such as those offered by Wine and VMWare. However, the feedback I'm getting is that Linux users simply do not want to be forced to revert to Windows just to run one application.

Below is an excerpt from an email I recently received:

"I am desirous of using Ubuntu as a replacement for Microsoft XP.  I use Quicken as a financial system because my bank uses it.  As a consequence,and because Quicken may not be used on Linus systems, I necessarily retain XP solely for  that use.  Do you know of a program which can replace Quicken, or do you expect Quicken to be adapted to Linux? I don't want to use WINE, for I want to completely leave the Microsoft influence."

Those who want more convincing about the desire of users to get away from Windows completely may want to consider what a number of small business users are saying on Intuit's own forum here .

There is obviously a lot of angst among the small business user community because they want to keep their costs down, their licenses simple and their machines running. On the following page, we look at how one particular small business feels about not being given the option to run Quickbooks on Linux.