[Ma-linux] Tax preparation programs for Linux

[Peter Teuben]

I do want to add a humurous story on this: I actually bought Taxcut last
year, and installed it on a mac i have for our software development.

But - and I must be the most unlucky person on the planet - all my
software seems to contain a feature where a file/directory name is
present in a mixed filename case collision, e.g. Math.h in the package
collided with math.h in /usr/include,   the file BUGS collided with the
directory bugs, etc.etc. Unbelieveable. After all, MacOSX in its default
configuration doesn't know how to distinguish (like vfat).

After a disk issue I reinstalled MacOSX with the case mapping properly
done. taxcut then ran into an error where help files were not found.
Turned out that the people who wrote the code didn't map file names to
mono-case, because the people who wrote the helpfiles decided on a
difference convention from the people who wrote the code...   I spent a
few hours, and an extra partition, to get another OS boot. After
complaining TaxCut Co. (H&R block) sent me a nice $40 check back, so
they honored their 'satisfaction guarenteed' statement. Very nice.
Hopefully that bug is fixed this year.

I've since had numerous discussions with mac zealout collegues, and
pretty much without exception they actually defend Apple's decision to
stick to monocase. Still hard to grok after 25 years of many unix
flavors.....

peter