The seductive answer is “trillions.” The honest answer is narrower and more useful. If the world’s desktop users broadly switched from proprietary PC software to Linux and open-source replacements, the visible savings on operating systems and productivity subscriptions could plausibly land somewhere around $50 billion to $130 billion a year. That estimate is built from current Microsoft list prices, Microsoft’s own subscriber figures, Canonical’s enterprise Ubuntu pricing, and a working range of roughly 1.0 to 1.4 billion Windows devices. It is a model, not a universal invoice, and it excludes a great deal of migration pain, retraining, and replacement work for cloud collaboration stacks.
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The broader open-source story is larger than desktop licensing. Harvard Business School researchers estimated in 2024 that widely used open-source software carries about $8.8 trillion in demand-side value, and that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software if that open-source layer vanished and had to be rebuilt internally. That is not the amount the world would instantly “save” by putting Linux on every laptop. It is a reminder that open source already subsidizes the modern software economy on a massive scale.
The easy fantasy and the harder math
People often imagine this switch as a clean before-and-after. One day the world pays for Windows, Microsoft 365, Adobe, and assorted proprietary tools. The next day everybody installs Linux, LibreOffice, and a few open-source extras, and the bill disappears. That is not how software costs behave. Some costs vanish. Others move. Some return later as support contracts, migration projects, compatibility work, or cloud hosting.
Still, the question matters more now because Windows 10 support ended on October 14, 2025, and Microsoft now treats the move to newer hardware and newer software as the normal path forward. Many older PCs still work perfectly well, but the supported software path around them has narrowed. That is exactly where Linux and open-source desktop tools become economically interesting.
There is also plenty of room for change. Statcounter’s worldwide desktop figures for March 2026 show Windows at 60.8% and Linux at 3.16%. Linux is no fringe curiosity, but it is still far from mainstream on the desktop. Any serious shift in that balance would move real money, not just ideology.
The spending that actually matters
The first chunk of money sits in the operating system itself. Microsoft’s current U.S. store price for Windows 11 Pro is $199.99. Very few organizations buy every seat that way, and OEM licensing is often cheaper, so this is best treated as a visible retail benchmark rather than a literal global average. Even so, annualized over a five-year PC life, that is about $40 billion a year across 1 billion Windows devices, or about $56 billion a year across 1.4 billion devices.
The second chunk sits in office software and the subscriptions wrapped around it. Microsoft currently lists Microsoft 365 Personal at $99.99 a year, and in FY25 Q4 the company said it had 89.0 million Microsoft 365 consumer subscribers. Using the Personal plan as a rough pricing yardstick, that is about $8.9 billion a year in consumer subscription spend alone. It is not a perfect measure because Microsoft sells multiple consumer plans at different price points, but it is a reasonable public benchmark.
The commercial side is larger and messier. Microsoft lists Microsoft 365 Business Basic at $6 per user per month and Business Standard at $12.50 per user per month. Business Standard also bundles professional email, cloud file storage, meetings, and other services, which is exactly why replacing it with “just LibreOffice” is not an apples-to-apples swap. You are not only replacing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You are also replacing parts of email, storage, collaboration, identity, and admin workflows.
LibreOffice is the obvious open-source office benchmark here because it is free, open source, and compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. That makes it economically attractive on paper. It does not, by itself, replace the whole Microsoft 365 stack.
A working model of yearly savings
| Scenario | Assumptions | Modeled yearly savings |
|---|---|---|
| Conservative | 1.0B Windows devices, 89M consumer M365 subscribers, 100M business users moving off Business Basic, paid Ubuntu Pro support on those 100M business devices | $53.6B |
| Middle | 1.0B Windows devices, 89M consumer M365 subscribers, 250M business users moving off Business Standard, paid Ubuntu Pro support on those 250M devices | $80.1B |
| Aggressive | 1.4B Windows devices, 89M consumer M365 subscribers, 500M business users moving off Business Standard, paid Ubuntu Pro support on those 500M devices | $127.4B |
These figures are deliberately cautious in one respect and generous in another. They subtract Ubuntu Pro desktop support at $25 per workstation per year, so the model is not pretending enterprise Linux support is free. Yet they still treat Windows retail pricing as a benchmark and do not fully price in migration, retraining, document cleanup, or specialized app replacement. That is why the right reading is “order of magnitude,” not “final bill.”
The bill does not disappear, it moves
This is where open-source evangelism often loses credibility. Linux can reduce licensing costs sharply. It does not eliminate the need for operations, support, governance, and expertise. Canonical’s pricing makes that plain enough: personal Ubuntu Pro can be free on a handful of machines, but enterprise desktop support is a paid product. That is not a weakness of open source. It is the adult version of open source.
The same principle holds higher up the stack. If a company leaves Microsoft 365, the company still needs email, storage, permissions, backups, endpoint management, and help-desk processes. A household may not care. A 20.000-person organization cares a great deal. The cash savings can still be substantial, but they arrive only when the new stack fits the work instead of fighting it.
The Linux Foundation’s recent research makes the trade-off even clearer. It found that organizations contributing upstream to open source report 2x to 5x benefit-to-cost ratios, while organizations maintaining private forks and internal workarounds can burn hundreds of thousands of dollars on that hidden maintenance burden. Open source saves the most money when it is adopted intelligently, not when every company turns itself into a one-off distro maintainer.
Open source already carries a giant hidden subsidy
The most interesting part of this topic is not the desktop arithmetic. It is the scale mismatch between what people notice and what actually runs the software economy. People notice Windows licenses because they are explicit. They notice Microsoft 365 because it renews every month or every year. They do not notice the open-source libraries, databases, runtimes, frameworks, containers, and infrastructure layers that already keep global software spending lower than it would otherwise be.
That is why the Harvard estimate matters. $8.8 trillion in demand-side value is not a desktop replacement budget. It is a signal that the world has already built a huge share of its digital economy on code nobody had to license in the traditional way. Linux is part of that picture, but only part. The deeper saving comes from shared software capital: code written once, improved by many, and reused at staggering scale.
Seen that way, the user’s question has two answers. The narrow one is about tens of billions a year in desktop and office software savings. The wide one is about trillions in economic value already created by open-source production. Confusing those two numbers creates bad arguments. Keeping them separate makes the case stronger.
The savings are real, but they are not automatic
A world that used more Linux and more open-source software would almost certainly spend less on visible software licensing. Households could save immediately. Schools, municipalities, and thin-client office environments could save a great deal if their workflows fit the toolset. Older hardware could stay in service longer, which changes the economics again by reducing forced refresh cycles after support deadlines such as the Windows 10 cutoff in October 2025.
But “everyone should switch” is still too blunt to be serious. Hospitals, design studios, engineering firms, broadcast environments, specialist laboratories, and heavily regulated enterprises all run software estates that do not collapse neatly into “install Linux and LibreOffice.” The world would save money, yes. It would not save the same amount everywhere, and some environments would pay a real short-term premium before the long-term curve turned in their favor.
That leaves the cleanest answer looking like this: the desktop layer alone could plausibly save around $50 billion to $130 billion a year, while the broader open-source ecosystem already creates value measured in trillions. Linux is not magic, and open source is not the same thing as zero cost. Even so, the financial case is far stronger than many executives still pretend. The expensive part is often not the software itself. It is the habit of paying rent on tools the world increasingly knows how to build together.
Author:
Jan Bielik
CEO & Founder of Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency
This article is an original analysis supported by the sources cited below
Desktop Operating System Market Share Worldwide
Statcounter data showing worldwide desktop OS market shares for March 2026, including Windows and Linux.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop
Windows 10 support has ended on October 14, 2025
Official Microsoft support documentation on the end of support for Windows 10 and its consequences.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-support-has-ended-on-october-14-2025-2ca8b313-1946-43d3-b55c-2b95b107f281
Buy and Download Windows 11 Pro
Official Microsoft Store page listing the current retail price of Windows 11 Pro.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h4
Buy Microsoft 365 Personal
Official Microsoft Store page listing Microsoft 365 Personal pricing.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/microsoft-365-personal/cfq7ttc0k5bf
Microsoft 365 Pricing for Business
Official Microsoft pricing page for Microsoft 365 Business plans including Business Basic and Business Standard.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/microsoft-365-plans-and-pricing
Microsoft 365 Business Standard
Official Microsoft product page showing included business features such as email, storage, meetings, and pricing.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/microsoft-365-business-standard
FY25 Q4 Productivity and Business Processes Performance
Official Microsoft investor relations page reporting 89.0 million Microsoft 365 consumer subscribers in FY25 Q4 and commercial seat growth.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2025-q4/productivity-and-business-processes-performance
Microsoft 2022 Annual Report
Official Microsoft annual report stating that more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices were running Windows 10 or Windows 11.
https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar22/index.html
AI Diffusion Report Where AI is most used developed and used to create
Microsoft Research report referring to telemetry from over one billion Windows devices, useful as a current conservative range marker.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Microsoft-AI-Diffusion-Report.pdf
Ubuntu Pro pricing
Official Ubuntu pricing page showing free personal use tiers and enterprise desktop pricing for Ubuntu Pro.
https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro
Home LibreOffice
Official LibreOffice page describing LibreOffice as free and open source and compatible with Microsoft Office file formats.
https://www.libreoffice.org/
ROI for Open Source Software Contribution
Linux Foundation Research page summarizing measured returns and hidden costs around open-source contribution and maintenance.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/contribution-roi
The Value of Open Source Software
Harvard Business School working paper estimating the global demand-side value of widely used open-source software at $8.8 trillion.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65230
