Member Avatar for frog3764

Here in the Philippines, on-line gaming is very popular with the younger people at the internet cafes. I am considering buying an established internet cafe. I will have one or two pc's with Windows, but the rest I plan on using Linux. My question is are there any limits or restrictions when using Linux for the various websites for on-line gaming? Since ole Bill Gates is cracking down on piracy, and the Philippine government is doing inspections at the internet cafes, which is an epedemic here, I can use Linux legally without buying a bunch of licenses for Windows. Only a couple of Windows PC's will be available in case someone thinks they need it. How about any plugins necessary for some websites for their gaming? All input is appreciated.

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Building on points from , and , here is a practical, up-to-date view for running an internet cafe with Linux as the primary OS and a small Windows contingency.

Use compatibility layers and community reports to decide which titles can be hosted on Linux. Wine and Valve's Proton are the foundations for many Windows games; use the official Wine site and the community database at ProtonDB to check per-title results before committing hardware to a game list (WineHQ, ProtonDB). Lutris is a convenient manager that automates Wine/Proton setups for many clients (Lutris). Note that anti-cheat and DRM behavior changes often — verify current compatibility for each competitive title.

Web/plug‑in landscape has changed: major plugin tech was deprecated or removed (Adobe Flash reached end‑of‑life in 2020), and modern browser games now rely on HTML5/WebGL/DRM. For DRM-protected content use browsers with Widevine support; for anything that specifically requires Internet‑Explorer/ActiveX or legacy plugins, a Windows client will still be necessary (Flash EOL).

Operational tips specific to a cafe: pick a long‑term‑support distro and current GPU drivers for best performance; image and rollback every station (Clonezilla is a simple option) so you can quickly restore clean clients between sessions (Clonezilla). Centralize account/session control with LDAP/FreeIPA or thin‑client tooling if you have many seats. Keep one or two locked‑down Windows machines (or a single licensed VM host) for titles that will not run reliably under Linux.

Test every game and lobby site in a lab setup before you go live. Use the links above to research compatibility and maintain an explicit list of which games are supported under Linux, which need Windows, and which are blocked by anti‑cheat/DRM.

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Member Avatar for necrolin

Linux isn't a great platform for gaming. There are few commercial games for Linux so unless you're talking about Flash based games chances are your games won't work. If you want games go Windows.

Member Avatar for Mocabilly

There are a few, older though, games that you can run perfectly on linux, like enemy territory (witch is in fact more stable/faster in linux for me then it is in win xp) for example
Dunno about new Linux games since my hardware wont support them anyway..

Flash works fine on Linux for me.. I thought there was a linux version of silverlight too. (or is being developed)

I'm afraid that if you use eater web based or installed games, you'll have to check the legal use of the game, game per game..

Member Avatar for necrolin

I'm going to assume he means an internet cafe like we have in Asia. A place packed full of computers and a ton of people there to game. This is quite different from the internet cafes which I've seen in north america where they have a coffee shop with a couple of computers for people to surf the net. Linux is most certainly not going to work for the Asian style internet cafe. Even for the north North American style internet cafes I think that if most people saw linux they would just go "huh?? What the hell is this and where is IE??!!". I don't think it's a good idea from a marketing point of view.

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