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My friend owns a cyber café and is facing lot of problem with various Windows operating systems. I thought about using Linux Mint or an Ubuntu flavor for the cyber café.

I've seen Linux Mint's user interface and consider it more user friendly than any Windows OS, specifically Windows 8.

Please tell me if I can suggest to my friend to use Linux Mint, considering security concerns and general usability.

Minix
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smarterway
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  • Hello @smarterway. Welcome to Unix&Linux SE. I edited your question to make it a bit cleaner. Feel free to revert back any changes you feel are misrepresenting your original question. Also: Consider adding what problems your friend has with Windows at the moment and what features you hope for and wish the particular Linux distribution to have to the question to make it less subjective. – Minix Dec 16 '14 at 08:55
  • You also don't have to reinvent the wheel. Searching for `linux kiosk` online, brought up this site: http://porteus-kiosk.org/ – Minix Dec 16 '14 at 09:10
  • I just went through a similar exercise and I am quite pleased with results. I posted up the whole setup here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/344374/how-to-configure-kiosk-with-wayland-xorg My setup required one webpage only, hence I chose Surf browser in -K mode - with everything disabled but the left-click. You can set whatever else you like for browser. Please feel free to ask, if anything unclear. – r0berts Feb 14 '17 at 07:40

2 Answers2

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Great option :-

you can try some more flavors also like xubuntu,lubuntu,and ubuntu unity

Anyways Mint is also great and compatible with much devices their are some valid points also

  1. Cost cutting Linux is absolutely free
  2. Virus Free no need to install AV softwares
  3. Faster smoother and lighter believe me your experience will be awesome

and some draw backs

  1. MS Office cant be use
  2. device compatibility sometimes
  3. Some sites require explicitly Internet explorer (IE)

Other wise its best

Security Beast
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Definitely go for Linux! Especially in a place where number of strangers will be using it... And I'd also suggest to make only terminals accessible for users (terminal server - terminal client model) to block them from physically accessing the machine itself. Users tend to browse in non secure sites, plug various USB devices with hell knows what evil living inside... M$ is too sensitive for those evil bits and will snap eventually (you'll be lucky if one node will not spread malware to others..). In Linux you do not have to worry about any of this. Yes, there are some drawbacks considering compatibility as M$ production is not working that well on *NIX, but you can always grab a copy of WINE (if Linux alternatives are not good enough for you) or even use a virtual machine with windows preinstalled on it if you need it that much. If anyone screws with your VM you can always restore it within minutes (or as long as it takes too copy single VM file from backups..)

Linux Mint is one great choice. It's very good looking (not as good as KDE, but kde as wayy to buggy... yes, even now with the latest releases - I make it crash by doing...nothing..), very user-friendly, fast enough and has pretty much all the packages preinstalled already.

If I were you I'd have already made server-terminal model and installed any flavour of *ubuntu/mint there...

P.S. for starters you can build as separate PC (or a few) with Mint running in it/them to see how people react. Make some ads to attract customers to Linux-based hosts to try them out. If people tend to stick to them later - you're definitely good to migrate to Linux.

netikras
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