

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.
I always just booted the old kernel when I ran into the issue, but it was less than ideal, which is why I would prefer to run a stable distro in this case.
Also, isn’t ElementaryOS a stable distro anyway due to being Ubuntu-based?