The discreet charm of install parties

August 29, 2026 | 11 Minute Read

It had been a long time since I’d been to an install party. Even longer since I’d co-organized one. At CRANS, at ENS Cachan, I was part of the organizing team for two of them, gave talks, did installs myself, and even made the posters. At IP7 association, at Paris 7 University, I took the lead in organizing several more over two years.. Those days feel far away…

Saturday afternoon. Back room of the “Robin des bios” community grocery store in Lille, in northern France. A jumble of tables, a Wi-Fi router, a few cables, and an extension cord snaking across the floor. Operating budget: zero. Donated time, coffee, electricity, and a little borrowed bandwidth. What it does have is a method. It isn’t a digital transformation summit with a keynote and a sponsor wall. It’s not much. It’s enough.

Behind us, crates of local vegetables and jars of preserves — the store’s stock. On the other side, a desk, invoices, a calendar.

Gathered around the table, we’re a handful of geeks: some recognizable by their cryptic T-shirts, others in plainer ones, trying not to advertise it. Most of us have the pale complexion of people who’ve spent too much time under artificial light. Seven men, one woman, no people of color. Those are the first two problems of the day — and unlike the technical ones, neither has a quick fix.

A shared culture

“Is this the install party?”
“Yes… First time at an install party?”
I point to the text on my T-shirt.
“Ah — okay.”
“Coffee?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“What are you installing these days?”
The volunteers glance at each other.
“Mostly Linux Mint, or—”
“Or Debian.”

A far cry from the days when we installed Ubuntu everywhere. I used to order crates of CDs from Canonical. I’d hand them out outside the university library at Paris 7 back then. Later, Canonical shipped Snap, with a store backend controlled only by Canonical. And in 2012, searching your own desktop for a file could surface Amazon products, with a commission for Canonical. That left a bad taste. Nothing is guaranteed, even in the free-software world: it’s a power struggle, not a religion.

Taking back control

The first visitors. A slightly surprised look at the setting. A young woman sets her computer on the table.

“I’ve already done my backups. My ex installed Linux for me… but he never really explained it.”

Oops. I suddenly feel guilty. A few years ago, I did the same thing. I left my ex fighting a flaky Wi-Fi driver for years. I had given her Linux. I hadn’t given her the means to keep it running.

She says her name is Clémence.
“I’d like to get rid of Windows,” Clémence continues.
She says it with a laugh, like she’s apologizing. It’s the most repeated phrase of the afternoon.
“Yes… With everything in the news… For security… Privacy… And this machine can’t run Windows 11.”

Since support for Windows 10 ended in October 2025, the issue has become a recurring topic in tech conversations with non-experts. Windows 11 requires a TPM 2.0 chip and a CPU on Microsoft’s supported list, leaving many otherwise capable machines outside the supported upgrade path. Extended Security Updates buy users additional time, but they don’t resolve the underlying hardware transition. Microsoft has rarely done so much to promote Linux.

We get started. Almost immediately, something needs checking, and that means opening a terminal.
“Hang on, let’s figure out why. Go ahead, open a terminal.”
The young woman looks worried.
“It’s a bit like talking to Siri on your iPhone, except in text and with a much stricter language. You ask it things, it answers. And parts of it are standardized… there’s a standard called POSIX…”

The answer to a tech question rarely contains only the answer to the tech question. Clémence, meanwhile, is taking notes! “In real life, I’m a librarian,” she jokes.

“There… Type this.”
The lines scroll by.
“Awesome!”

Nobody knows everything

A little further along, an older woman arrives with a friend.
“Hello, I’m Françoise. I emailed chtinux…”
The diagnosis: unrecognized Wi-Fi card. A recent Realtek chipset.

Around the table, the hive springs into action. No one knows everything, but someone, somewhere, always knows something. Ludovic, a volunteer for several years, sits down at the keyboard.

“Hang on, Ludovic… I know there’s a guy who made a driver for this card model. Here, plug in with this cable in the meantime. Type lspci. See those lines? Google this: site:github.com with this vendor_id and this product_id… There… Yes, that’s the GitHub repo.”
“What’s DKMS?” Ludovic asks, reacting to one of the installation options. “It keeps third-party kernel modules working across kernel updates. Otherwise you have to recompile them by hand.”
“It compiles but it doesn’t work.”
The volunteer turns around.

“Hey Xavier, remember how we did it last time?”
Xavier leaves his chair to come over.
“Hang on… There was a parameter to pass to the kernel… and uh… you need to install this lib too.”
“Want the keyboard?” Ludovic offers.
“No. You do it.”

Four words that sum up the whole method. Taking the keyboard would have been twice as fast, and twice as useless. The install party trains the installers, too. In corporate language, this would be called knowledge transfer. Here, it costs nothing extra. It’s simply the default.

Nothing about that principle depends on being a volunteer organization.

When a driver becomes political

“Why isn’t there a built-in driver?” someone else asks.
“Closed specifications… the manufacturers…”
The proprietary drivers question sends the conversation off on a tangent. Another geek, a university professor I know, passionately explains one of free software’s founding stories. MIT, the problem with the Xerox printer, Richard Stallman…
“The interesting thing in Stallman’s story isn’t even the printer. It’s that before that, researchers shared code naturally. And then someone tells him: ‘No, I have it, but I’m contractually barred from sharing it with you.’”

That’s the moment the technical problem also becomes a social one. Locking down hardware or software reduces the user’s ability to understand, and strips users of their ability to act. Fixing this Wi-Fi is as much a matter of networking as of property rights.
“There… that’s why it’s important to guarantee users these freedoms with free software.”

Who made this machine obsolete?

While we’re talking, a tall guy arrives with a tower PC. It’s unusual now; almost everyone shows up with a laptop. Yellowed gray plastic. 24x CD-ROM drive. Floppy drive. No way, is that what I think it is? Yes.
“I don’t like the idea of this machine being useless, he says. And Windows 95 is too dangerous to put on the internet.”
Two geeks lean in, surprised and delighted. A Proustian madeleine for old Linux hands.
“The install’s going to be painful, i386 is no longer supported by recent Debian installers.”
“Ah, I brought this too…”
He unpacks a binder containing the seven CD-ROMs of a venerable Debian Woody from the early 2000s. Wow.
“Okay, we’ll install with that, but then we’ll have to see how far we can safely upgrade it. Linux doesn’t solve everything!”

Someone brings a monitor. A VGA adapter. The screen spits out its lines from another era.

AMIBIOS (C) 1996 American Megatrends Inc.
BIOS Version 1.00.05.CS0
Pentium(R) II Processor 350MHz
Checking NVRAM..
128MB OK
Auto-Detecting Pri Master..IDE Hard Disk
Auto-Detecting Sec Master..ATAPI CDROM
Pri Master: SAMSUNG SV0644A  RA100-10
51-0102-001437-00111111-071595-440BX-H

The installation is maddeningly slow. It’s accompanied by the gentle whir of the CD-ROM spinning while APT hunts for its software packages. APT asks to insert another CD-ROM. A few more packages. GRUB. Reboot. GDM, then GNOME appears on the screen… It’s GNOME 1. Good old GTK 1.2. Legendary design.

“Wow… it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that…”
“Haha, back then I used Enlightenment 16, with esound!”
“It was way cooler than Gnome.”

Nostalgia is running at full throttle, but there’s something else here beyond old-timers getting misty-eyed. In a world built around replacing perfectly usable smartphones every few years, stubbornly keeping a 1998 machine running for office work is a small act of defiance against forced obsolescence.

“Now, what can I do with this machine? the owner asks, curious.”
“Honestly, not much. A small server. Office work, at a stretch. But as for the web, forget it.”

It’s not the Pentium II that lost the ability to handle the web: it’s the websites that got bloated. A modern mainstream homepage, once loaded, can easily demands more RAM than this tower has. Much of digital obsolescence isn’t purely material. It’s often the result of decisions made elsewhere, by others, then billed to the user in the form of a replacement.

The PC was the easy part

A man in a sweater has been watching the scene for a while, arms crossed, without putting down his bag.
“And for smartphones, can we ditch Big Tech too?”

Around the table, the buzz gives way to a brief silence. One of the volunteers lets out a small resigned sigh.
“Yes, there are systems like GrapheneOS, LineageOS, or /e/OS. But it’s… more complicated…”
“Hardware support is a lottery: GrapheneOS, for example, officially supports only Pixel devices,” one of the geeks explains.

The man — Patrick, as we’ll later learn — pulls his device from his pocket and sets it on the table.
“I’ve got this. I just want them to stop reading my emails and knowing where I am all the time. With everything going on, I’m afraid we’re sliding toward something totalitarian.”
Our university colleague puts it more bluntly: techno-fascism.
“The problem,” the volunteer explains while examining the phone, “is that manufacturers lock the bootloader. It’s like they’ve welded the hood of the car shut. On a PC, you’re normally free to change the operating system. On a phone, you often have to hack around restrictions on your own hardware to get that freedom back. And on your model…”

He taps away for a few seconds on his own screen.
“No. Bootloader locked. No practical way to put a free operating system on that.”
Disappointment shows on the man’s face.
“We should do a workshop on that”, someone says.

“Have a seat,” the volunteer offers. “We can’t change the system, but we can plug the leaks. We remove the most intrusive apps, block trackers with an alternative DNS, and install F-Droid to find apps that respect your privacy. You’ll already take back a lot of control without breaking anything.”

Harm reduction, for lack of better options. And the window keeps narrowing: Google is extending developer-verification requirements to app installation beyond the Play Store. Power users retain an advanced path for installing apps from unverified developers, but the default shifts again: installing software on a device you paid for increasingly depends on rules enforced by the platform vendor. The locked bootloader was only the first layer of platform control.

Success means becoming unnecessary

The afternoon is drawing to a close. The light fades through the grocery store’s little window.

Clémence, the librarian from earlier, has finished taking her notes. Her system is set up, her passwords are safe in an encrypted vault, and she’s just run her first system update from the terminal. Without trembling.

“Well,” says the person who helped her, leaning back in his chair with a satisfied smile. “Ideally, you won’t need us anymore.”

That might be the most radical act of the whole afternoon. In a digital world structured to lock us in, keep us captive and subscribed, and make us deeply dependent on tech support or a Genius Bar, the ultimate goal of this back room is to make itself unnecessary. Much of modern consumer tech trades convenience for control; the install party demands a bit of effort, but gives users back the ability to act. There is no reason this principle should stop at the door of a volunteer back room. What works here on donated time and borrowed bandwidth is not a technology stack. It’s an operating principle. An IT department can be judged by the same question: does its support leave people more capable than before, or more dependent?

Clémence closes her laptop. She thanks the table, packs her machine into her bag, and leaves.

On the next table, the lid of a new laptop opens.
“Last one of the day.”
“What’s the problem with this one?”
Someone pours more coffee.

Author’s note: first names and some details have been changed.