Dual boot rabbit hole

So I got an asus E202s as an affordable work laptop with a dual core Celeron clocked at 1.6, 4gb ram etc. Came with Chinese windows 10 (which disables language pack downloads potentially to discourage the grey market). I didn't want to get rid of windows just yet since there are a few use cases and so on, so decided to dual boot (total noob to dual boot, previously only wiped old laptops to clean install Ubuntu-based distros).
Tried a live usb of Kubuntu 15.10 (cuz eyecandy) and installed, got an error installing grub but turning off fastboot and secureboot in the bios (uefi in legacy mode i think?) seemed to fix that. Worked for a day albeit with a little odd flickering going in or out of login prompt etc, during which time I let it idle for a few hours. The next morning I switched it on to find kubuntu wouldn't boot with either kernel variant. 'resume normal boot' from recovery gets the cpu lockup error in the screenshot.
live usbs of kubuntu 15.10, debian 8.2 with lxde, kubuntu 15.04 and antix 15 have since all failed to load. kubuntu 15.04 got as far as trying to load systemd before crashing, and antix got no further than the bootloader. I've tried unetbootin and rufus.
Windows still works as before.
I can try another usb, though it seems the issue is elsewhere. Flashing the bios makes me a little nervous and I don't know if that's the solution until I understand the problem. Is it worth trying a 32-bit iso?
any help would be enormously appreciated
New photo by Haroun Lazim
New photo by Haroun Lazim
New photo by Haroun Lazim
New photo by Haroun Lazim
New photo by Haroun Lazim
New photo by Haroun Lazim

Enabled CSM in the bios, kubuntu works -_- so yea, you can close this i guess

edit
crying softly ceases to boot again. there is now a second update to the kernel loaded onto it, so there are three options in grub. but none of them work. was having weird wireless card issues while it was working too. maybe none of these kernels fully supports the hardware at this moment in time? should I wait a bit?

Yeah try antegros or something with an up to date kernel.

arch huh? i'd thought about it, was a bit concerned about it breaking when i need the thing for work stuff (just office/ web etc). is it easy enough to 'roll back' updates in arch systems if something breaks? what about manjaro or netrunner, lots of people were raving about those for a while? not a massive fan of gnome...

You know what. Strike what I said. I keep forgetting about linux mint debian edition.

Try that.

ok will give it a whirl

booted the lmde usb, which sort of worked but cinnamon crashed and it loaded into fallback mode. am going to try one or two other usb drives, maybe an arch-based system

edit: been a little busy, but just came back and tried an old copy of puppy slacko lying on a 2 gig usb drive that's worked on every old piece of crap i've tried it on, didn't even get to a prompt/splash whatever. is it at all likely i'm dealing with a uefi issue? my lack of knowledge re: mbr/bios/uefi stuff is really showing here. also i notice it's necessary to do a little hunting to get specific info on this hardware/software combination. are there other more help-oriented forums or documentation sources that might be useful? should i just wait on another kernel update to see if it fixes it? nothing too peculiar about this celeron...