Newbie struggles re. bootable USB

Hello! I've had good success in bygone years with creating "Hackintosh" laptops. But I am new to Linux in general, and I'm currently trying to install LinuxCNC on an Acer Aspire laptop with touch screen (Intel i5, with 8GB of ram) to create a system to drive a CNC plasma cut table I am building.

I first tried the ...

• LinuxCNC 2.8.2  Debian 10 Buster PREEMPT-RT ISO

 ...from the main downloads page.

I am on a Mac as far as downloading ISO and making bootable. However, I could also work from Windows 10, as I have that both on the laptop being targeted for LinuxCNC, as well as Windows 10 in a virtual machine on the MacBook Pro. 

The MacOS image mounter cannot open or mount the ISO as is because: "no mountable file systems"

I tried using Mac's Disk Utility to "restore" the ISO to the USB. But, "the image does not have a checksum so it cannot be verified.

I then tried using the terminal in the Mac, using steps from here: 
HOW TO MAKE A BOOTABLE USB STICK FROM AN ISO FILE ON AN APPLE MAC OS X
from www.lewan.com/blog/2012/02/10/making-a-b...mac-os-x-from-an-iso

That got me to a USB that was supposedly bootable and could be ejected for trying. However, attempts to boot the Acer laptop from the resulting USB drive fail, with "Default boot device missing or Boot Failed."

I tried to download and use win32imager, as it was mentioned in a post here. However, it seems to be source files that need compiled, and I don't know how to compile them.

I repeated the above steps with Linux Mint 21 BETA in trying for LinuxCNC 2.9 or Master on that. Got basically the same failures.

Would anyone be able to nudge me in the right direction? Thanks in advance for helping a newbie.

UPDATE: success —

I switched to using Windows 10 (in my virtual machine) and used process and suggested USB loader software from this video:


And I'm now into a Linux install screen on the laptop! Thanks for all you do!

I use balenaEtcher on my Mac for creating bootable USB's from ISO files with great success.
 

Thanks! Good to know.

You might be amused to learn that the LinuxCNC 2.8 ISO files were actually created on a Mac, using a VMware VM. I do all my LinuxCNC development sat at a Mac, though often ssh-ed into various other computers scattered about the house and workshop. It's got the best chair and desk.
And I have always used dd on the Mac to copy (and test) the images. So it really ought to work.

Thanks for the idea to just install the mint. I was finally able to get my computer to load the standard Cinnamon 64-bit version with out problems. Using rufus-3.19 and an older 4GB usb flash.
My system bios was set back to factory settings and is the original bios version shipped with the board - 2 steps back from what is current. Tried to load 3 versions of Debian from Linuxcnc download page with out success. Tried many different options and could never boot - would just hang with many lines of error this and error that.
My hardware is:

Asus Prime 550M-A WIFI II mother board
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G
16G (2 - 8G sticks) Cosair Vengence ram
256GB Tammuz GKV700 256GB NVMe SSD- made boot drive
256GB Ramata R600 mSATA SSD 128GB/256GB 3x5cm Mini SSD
Zeus mini usb keyboard
Roccat Burst usb mouse

The factory bios settings wants to run ram at 2133MHz but I can speed up in the Ai Tweaker to spec. speed of 3200MHz.
Important to set admin bios password on this MB.
Debian installs I tried also found all the hardware.

I am not new to linuxcnc. Years ago I was able to make it work on a small router with steppers. Then I was using an older Pentium system with standard Ubuntu install from linuxcnc site. This was soon after name change from EMC2.

I am a newbie again now and saying thanks again to point me to another path.
Will try to add linuxcnc next.