The "easy installation" problem is something @yaxu has been trying to solve for many years.
Some thoughts:
-
If the laptops are enterprise managed, then Microsoft's SCCM tool may be usable if you can get access to it (highly unlikely though I expect)
-
I'm in the process of building a deployment playbook for ansible, but this is only for linux at this stage.
Ansible does run on windows, but is relatively fiddly to setup iirc so it may be just as much work configuring ansible to run as it is to configure tidalcycles, not to mention writiing and debugging the ansible config. -
If the laptops have Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) available, then you may be able to leverage my ansible scripts, but that has failed for a previous user and will probably require a little refactoring
-
I actually think your best bet in terms of workload reduction, is to use a livecd/usb boot image of something like ubuntu studio (realtime kernel permissions out of the box, jackd configured out of the box), apply my ansible script against it and run it temporarily - this is of no use to your students who may want to run it at home (depending on what OS they're using) though
-
(not a serious suggestion) If you can build a foolproof set of install instructions for windows, allocate time to getting your students to install it themselves
Good luck!