It is helpful to target the wine layer in the mid-term for moving the most commonly used applications to linux.
There's really no such thing as mid-term. More often than not the mid-term solution, if acceptable (not necessarily the best), simply sticks. And wine+proprietary apps is not a very good idea. If we promote a free solution from our end as a LUG (or as FSF for that matter), it should ideally be free (mukt).
- Move their servers first.
- Check which applications need to be moved on priority to Linux.
Web browser, messengers (yahoo and hotmail), PDF reader, office apps. Everything else (photoshop, corel, etc.) are novelty and not too many cyber cafes have it.
- Help wine with bug-reports on getting the said application on wine.
They work on features purely on _demand._
Every FOSS app works that way.
- Move small number of PCs as game pcs .. non-gaming pcs
It's generally difficult for smaller cafes to dedicate some PCs exclusively to gaming. Here we can make use of XWine (Disclaimer: I don't know how well it works with which games)
- Check with Crossover office if they are willing to make yahoo
messenger, msn messenger to work under linux. More the number of ppl who request for a
What do messengers by crossover office provide that are superior to gaim/kopete/ayttm/put_your_fav_foss_messenger_here? (It's a genuine question)
I seriously feel Wine is a really good intermediate solution to the problem of moving client desktops to Linux.
I really would prefer suggesting a longer term solution that would give users a truly great experience of FOSS software.
On the additional bonus side most apps / games run faster under Linux on wine :D
But surely not as fast as Linux apps under Linux :)