Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.
Because they went about it the wrong way. They made their own distro, their own office suite etc. I believe they would have been successful, if they just used already existing stuff, instead of reinventing the wheel and taking on all the development obligations.
What Schleswig-Holstein is doing, is using en established distro, with established office suite and established cloud solution. They only maintain the servers and maybe patch-fix issues, which they could then upstream.
They actually did a study on it after rolling back to Windows, and it turned out to not have failed due to technical difficulties at all.
If I recall correctly they stated that something like 80-90% of all issues reported during the period were due to badly designed processes - processes which were the same as in Windows, and the number of technical issues actually dropped.
Certainly, the fact that Microsoft promised to build a fancy new HQ in the city if they switched back to Windows can’t have had anything to do with the choice to roll back…