Well of course, real live linux caffes exist. I'm sitting in one right now
(www.linuxcaffe.ca) in Toronto.
Truth is stranger than fiction,
djp

Someone explain to me what these things are that I "have to do myself" to use Linux? I've been on it for six years, it's been pretty easy. Sure, there are occasional things I CAN optionally do to "sup up" my install with some cutting edge whizbangs, but using it out of the box required far less from me than the legacy OS.

And Linux isn't stable? Someone quick! tell Oracle, IBM, and RedHat before they make another massive deployment....

That would be really cool to set up a Linux cafe with lots of variety. There, all the Linux users could congregate, have parties, and drink delicious beverages and foodstuff brought in pot-luck style. Then, all of the Linux newbies could come to the cafe and get tech support from the helpful people there as well as eat food. Heh, a nice idea. Maybe someday...

Linux is stable. Very stable. A lot of the impressions about it having issues are based on taking anecdotes out of context. Most of us Linux freaks are NOT interested in the stability of our personal machines. We are the computer-world equivalent of hot-rod gearheads. We /like/ spending a day tinkering under the hood, seeing if we can get that extra bit of performance or just the right /sound/ to the engine. I have an old friend who loves his boat in the same way and he seems crazy to me. My personal system is unstable, and I want it this way because I like tuning, tweaking, learning and exploring.

This weekend, my daughter finally asked me to defenestrate her Vista box so I'm going to put a stable release of a familiar distro and leave it alone. I expect zero issues.

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You forgot to mention that in the Apple Cafe you must first buy an Apple cup as your not allowed to bring your own - it's part of a quality experience they say. We all know that's mostly BS, and you can find bigger and better cups in both Linux and Windows cafes, you can even find tough-cups designed for construction workers or the clumsy types that frequently drop and damage their cups. The Apple cups are good quality of course, but they really are not all that different from those cups they are practically giving away elsewhere. On the plus side however, your first cup is free.
Apple, unfortunately, doesn't have a huge market share yet, so many of the "must have" creamers don't mix with Apple coffee. No worries though, Apple doesn't restrict what you can put in your Apple cup, so feel free to stop by another cafe to pick-up what need. Unfortunately, most creamers at the windows cafe only mix with windows coffee, so you will need to dump out your Apple coffee and buy some windows coffee before you can use the desired creamer. If you don't want to dump out your coffee you can buy a virtual cup that fits in your Apple cup allowing have multiple coffees in the same cup simultaneously! However, please note that only non-Apple coffee's can be placed in virtual cups. Apple coffee will become very bitter and is not drinkable in a virtual cup (even if the virtual cup is placed in an Apple cup). This is of course perfectly legal cause the Apple cafe doesn't actually "sell" coffee, they "license" it and therefore can dictate to you how your coffee must be consumed. In theory, Microsoft could also have cup restrictions, but since they sell coffee rather than cups, they don't really care what you put it in.
Most cups only last a few years before the handle breaks. It is easy to spend a lot of money on creamers and accessories for your Apple cup, and you wont want to loose your investment when it breaks, so you will probably want to stick with Apple. Of course, by then your warranty will have expired and replacement parts will be obsolete and hard to find. But you'll probably want to buy the latest and greatest cup anyway. Chances are many of your creamers will still mix with the latest coffee, but there is of course no guarantee and some of your old creamers will likely need to be replaced. I would recommend a tough-mug but Apple doesn't currently sell them.
You might also be interested to know that Apple also sells a pocket sized travel mug, which has an absurdly large variety of creamers available. The lid can't be removed, however, and the creamers can only be inserted through a specially designed opening when properly packaged. Apple strictly controls the packaging though and only approved flavours are available. Truth be told however, while there are a handful of great flavours, most of them pretty much suck and the most interesting ones are always getting rejected. It's not entirely clear what flavours are allowed as many have spent countless hours only to have their flavour rejected because it tasted a bit to much like one of Apples own flavours. It does seem a bit odd to me though, considering that the EU doesn't allow windows cafes to sell coffee mixed with their own creamers as some sort of anti-trust thing. But, I guess until your considered a monopoly it's still ok to engage in anti-competitive practices.

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Nice "The Cappy" well done.

I'd be happy to go to all three cafes, but I'd probably be most likely to hang in the Apple one. There are only so many crashing chairs and Windows logos I could stand before heading back to the safe haven of a Bondi Blue cappuccino mug!

That said, there is something appealing about free and eclectic, and I would imagine there would be plenty of other patrons in the Linux cafe willing to help out those who couldn't brew their own coffee.