As a long-time Linux user (and as this topic is currently empty) I feel obliged to respond to this:
Total downloads struggle to reach 1 Gb per month, then only when I feel the need to download yet another Linux ISO than won't work.
I've probably downloaded and tested about 50 different Linux ISOs, and I have yet to find one which didn't work. Some are better than others of course, and occasionally there will be one which has installation problems on certain hardware, but they all 'work'.
So in what way didn't they work for you? I'm not intending to be argumentative here, just helpful if possible. Did they fail to boot? If so, and assuming that the BIOS is set up to boot from CD, then it's 99.9% certain that the reason is that the ISOs weren't written to the CD correctly. The ISO image is just that - a bit-by-bit, track-by-track image of the data on the CD, and it has to be written to the CD as an
image not as a file, in order to recreate the structure of directories and files on the CD.
If you (or anyone else) wants to have another go with Linux, then I'm happy to try to help.
Eric