All of the Linux flavors are known to provide the installation disks in the form of downloadable ISO images. You have to download these ISO images and then burn them on to a blank CD or DVD disk. And in the recent years, Microsoft has also started to offers downloadable ISO images for Windows, Visual Studio and Office products. The reason why all of these tech companies are accepting this model is because it makes it very easy to distribute new versions of your operating system and everyone all over the world can access these new versions as soon as they become available without waiting for the traditional disks to become available in a nearby store.
And if you decide to download the ISO images of these operating systems then you will find the free software InfraRecorder to be very useful. This portable software can burn the ISO images to blank CD or DVD disks. It can even copy the disks (copy from one and write to another), read disk to save it as an ISO image on your computer, and create disks with special contents like data disk, audio disk or a video disk.
In case you want to create a bootable CD/DVD image from the downloaded Linux or Windows ISO images, you have to select the Write Image option from the main interface of the InfraRecorder. This will ask you to choose an ISO image located somewhere on your PC.
As soon as you select an ISO disk, you will be shown the options for burning that ISO image on to an optical disk. At this stage, you can choose the DVD burner, write speed, write method, number of copies you want, and close the disk (prevent further writing on the disk). Clicking on the OK button shall process the disk burning which might take shorter or longer time depending on the ISO image size and the model of DVD burner you are using.
Conclusion: InfraRecorder is the easiest way for the Windows users to burn the ISO images and create bootable installation disks for the Linux or the Windows operating system.
You can download InfraRecorder from http://infrarecorder.org/.