It's unlikely Intuit will reverse course they've been decisioning this all year (the article below used to say "may restrict" for many months), so hoping for that is not a good plan; desktop is less than 1% of their revenue, 5% of total TurboTax revenue, declining 5% while online/live is increasing 10% annually. Per their latest quarterly results, they've no problem "yielding share for low average revenue per return users" (desktop and even some online) if revenue is growing at a clip elsewhere. So don't look to INTU shareholders for help - things like mailchimp are moving the stock, no one cares about Windows 10 (or ItsDeductible). They have all the numbers and have likely projected most will simply upgrade to 11 and move on, some will move to online, some will move to H&R Block - and some of those will come back in 2026 when this all blows over - and they don't care as long as online revenue keeps growing and probably determined it wasn't worthwhile to deliver and support s/w on an unsupported OS (ESU is not "extended support" just critical/important security patches), for what will be a small % of their users by Feb. We'll see in a year how it all falls out, but very likely a non-issue if not a revenue boost for Intuit.
So Intuit's position is clear - they aggressively remove unsupported OS (do it every year for MacOS), upgrade and use it or not, they don't care. Meanwhile, you presumably need a solution for your machine by October 2026 regardless of how you do your taxes; to use Turbo you just need to have a new machine 6 months sooner than otherwise. You can do all these workarounds or disrupt your tax prep process but you'll need a new machine a few months after you file if it can't handle Win 11.
Personally I think it's unlikely TT will work on Win 10 without some sort of hack, Intuit has stated "You won’t be able to install or use TurboTax Desktop 2025 on Windows 10." and even if you get it to download and install you have to activate the software I would imagine the activation server will check the OS version. Even if you get past all that, you'll be unsupported by both Intuit and MS, if you have any sort of issue with installation, importing 1099s, updates, forms, filing then the response is going to be you shouldn't be running it on Win 10 whether that's the issue or not. But it certainly seems worthwhile waiting a few months either way to confirm final direction by MS, Intuit and H&R Block.
https://ttlc.intuit.com/turbotax-support/en-us/help-article/download-products/end-support-windows-8-...
