You can encourage your target audience to back up their important data upfront in order to save them a couple of hours at the beginning of your party. But also try to bring plenty of external drives as others here have suggested already.

I’ve never run an installfest, but I’ve been to my university’s Linux Users Group installfests, and here’s what they did:

• Brought USBs with Fedora and OpenSUSE, which are their standard noob recommendations. Personally, I’ve used Debian for a long time, but I can get why Debian might not be something they want to recommend for noobs.
• Be there to help them
• If they’re a bit squeemish about it, have them install in a VM software like VirtualBox on Windows or something like UTM on macOS.

Also, I’d recommend you bring extra USB peripherals in case the internal devices need a little bit of work; bring some extra mice, keyboards, and ethernet adapters. You hopefully won’t need any of them, but they’ll certainly make life easier if you do.

As for time, I’d imagine doing the basic install and ironing out some (not all) of the kinks probably takes less than it takes for a group to stat D & D characters, if that’s a helpful comparison for you.

Anyone new to a subject gains their confidence (or not) if you’re confident (or not)

So, I’d suggest picking 1 distro to install,.and make sure you’re familiar with it.

Have multiple copies of the installer ready so you’re able to get things running in parallel and then you’re 75% ready.

Also be prepared for people turning up with all their cherished photos on their laptop not understanding what you’re about to do, so they’ll say they’re happy for you to install a new OS and then be upset that pictures of Fluffy aren’t there any more…

Suggestion: get the most visually different Linux distros you can. Set up demo machines with each different desktop environment. Leave them out and available for people to try each and see what they like. If you aren’t netbooting the installs, leave a bowl of cheap flash drives with the distros they are trying by the demo machines. Let people play with each one and describe what they want. Then when install time comes, go nuts.

If any of you have a spare laptop, maybe you can run a live OS for people to play around with?

If possible it might help to have a couple demo PCs out so that they and try different desktop environments. Some might be more enthusiastic if they can not only play around with it when it’s up and running (and gives people something to do while your helping others) but also if the DE matches their “workflow better” it also gives you a chance to show them how to do common tasks. Maybe different demos have different “suites”, like here’s the gaming demo, here’s regular, productivity, etc

I agree with some of the other posts, I’d stick with 1 distro (whichever all the helpers are most comfortable with) so that you can speak confidently about it, and decrease the chances of something going wrong and you having to break out Google and the terminal. A DE is an easier choice to explain that different distros affecting and impacting things they can’t see. Especially if you might have to provide tech support during the beginning. Maybe just say a throw away line or 2 about there being different distros, just like there’s different kinds of cheese. Still same thing at its core, just different options.

I also recommend a couple spare external hard drives for them to back up their files.

I’d maybe do just a brief overview at the beginning. And go more in depth afterwards so they don’t get overloaded.

I would actually go to something like this lol what’s on the agenda for the party???

I have nothing particular to suggest but I just want to say this sounds great and happy to see. Enjoy!

As you mentioned Linux Mint is very beginner friendly so I’d recommend that.

Linux Mint is a really good choice. I recently tried OpenSUSE and ran into all kinds of issues that I didn’t have with Mint. Hardware issues were the only issues I had with Mint. I prefer Xfce to Cinnamon though, preferably with the DesktopPal97 theme.

That is the extent of the help I can provide.

EDIT: Oh also, check that their hardware supports Linux. The glorious Arch wiki has that information available for a lot of distros.

Thank you all for your precious answers! I’ll have fun preparing that now 🙂

I’ll have my first Install Party next week. I will install Linux Mint because it is easy and well documented. I’ll bring a laptop with a clean install. So I can teach some basics while the installations are running.

Never heard of a “install party” what do you do on these parties?

great to hear! I love install parties. Mint, Fedora are awesome but bring some MX Linux and or Antix for older hardware! And dont forget those with only Ubuntu in their mouth 🙂

Also if you can take the time to give a little info on paper like, where is the updater, if they’re waiting for more you can show very little CLI (but i wouldnt it scares the ppl of 7 times out of 10)

absolut basics is:

• how to install stuff from software manager
• where to find our own files
• usual distro management from GUI

if they show signs for more knowledge throw some easy CLI (file management, tarball install)

Depending if your crowd is computer litterate or not.

Have fun

People are having parties for this?

Regarding distro, I’d go with something easy and very searchable, like Ubuntu or Mint.