Can I run my internet cafe on Linux?

Can you run an internet cafe on Linux? Yes. The more useful question is whether the room works. That has less to do with your management software than with two things people forget until opening night: which games your customers actually play and how much cheat protection you are willing to give up.

There are two machines hiding in this question and they pull in opposite directions. The counter is where you sit and run the place. The floor is where your customers play. Linux is an easy yes on the first and a genuine decision on the second.

Linux at the counter

This one is easy. Put it on Linux.

The server is a management station. It watches the floor, bills sessions, controls the PCs and pulls reports. It is not rendering anything. The requirements floor is a dual-core 2.0 GHz CPU with 4 GB of RAM, which means a machine you already own is very likely enough. There is also no Windows license in the bill.

Install libwebkit2gtk-4.1 before anything else. HandyCafe is built with Tauri v2, which uses WebKit2GTK on Linux. The app will not start without that package. Ubuntu 22.04 and newer or Fedora 38 and newer are supported, as is any distribution shipping an equivalent WebKit2GTK version.

Then open the ports. With ufw:

sudo ufw allow 5001:5004/tcp
sudo ufw allow 5004/udp

With raw iptables, add the equivalent INPUT ACCEPT rules for TCP 5001 to 5003 and UDP 5004. That is commands on TCP 5001, file transfers on 5002, the remote management control channel on 5003 and screen streaming on UDP 5004.

Nothing else about running the counter on Linux is unusual. The same is true if you would rather use a Mac, which is its own short answer with one big catch.

Linux on the floor

Different question entirely. The software is not the interesting part of it.

The client runs on Linux x64. It will install, connect and enforce sessions exactly as it does anywhere else. If your machines are Linux, HandyCafe is not the thing standing in your way.

Your games are. Titles with kernel-level anti-cheat generally do not run on Linux. Those are frequently the exact titles your customers walk in for. If your room lives on competitive shooters, the floor stays on Windows and no amount of enthusiasm for Linux changes that. This is not a limitation we can fix from our side. It is a decision the publishers made.

Where Linux clients genuinely make sense is a room that is not primarily about those games: study spaces, browsing and office seats, a lab, a training room, machines where the customer is paying for the computer rather than the titles on it. Those setups exist and they work well.

The part nobody mentions

If you do put Linux on customer machines, the tamper protection gets thinner. Considerably.

On Windows the client can apply memory protection by replacing its own process DACL, permanent DEP, an AppLocker or WDAC signature policy, a DLL load filter, AppInit_DLLs and IME injection blocking, plus more besides. It is a stack of controls built specifically because people try to cheat on cafe machines.

On Linux the equivalent list is one item: block ptrace, which stops non-root users attaching a debugger.

That is not us being lazy about Linux. Those Windows controls are Windows APIs, with no direct counterpart to call. The consequence is real regardless of the reason: a Linux gaming floor is a more exposed gaming floor. If you are running tournaments or your reputation depends on nobody cheating in your room, weigh that honestly before you reimage forty machines.

One thing to check before you switch

If you are moving from an older installation and you want your members, pricing, products, orders, transactions and logs to come across, that migration only runs on Windows. On macOS and Linux the section shows a notice telling you as much.

There is a way around it. Run the migration once on a Windows machine, take a cloud backup there, then restore that snapshot onto the Linux server, because a snapshot can be restored onto any HandyCafe install. The off-site backup ends up doing a job here it was never designed for.

The thing to avoid is discovering the Windows-only part after you have already wiped the old PC. Legacy clients connecting over the original protocol are a separate matter and they keep working on every platform.

What I would actually do

Linux server, Windows floor.

The counter is where Linux costs you nothing and saves you a license. The floor is where Windows is doing something you cannot replace: running the games and carrying the anti-cheat surface. The two do not have to match. The server and the clients only need the same local network and the four ports above.

That mixed setup is not a compromise anybody should feel bad about. It is just each machine running the thing it is actually good at, which is the same principle that decides most of the equipment choices in opening a cafe anyway.