Install from source is fairly likely to work: https://wiki.ros.org/noetic/Installation/Source

It doesn’t seem to have any outrageously complicated dependencies to work, just C++, Boost and a few other recognizable names, at least at a glance. They also seemingly have an ArchLinux package, which means it’s likely to at least be buildable on latest everything. Mint will fall in between, so the odds it’ll compile are pretty good.

Try it?

I haven’t really needed to virtualize anything lately, but my understanding is that some of the options on Linux are pretty light weight. Frpm discussion I’ve seen, I think distrobox could resolve the issue with minimal overhead if you have issues natively, though I haven’t personally experimented with it or its limitations.

May not qualify as “simple” versus a VM, but you can try using chroot environment. You essentially run minimal Ubuntu environment from a folder that can be a newer or old version of the host OS.

Here is one guide to get up and running.

This guide is easier to follow IMO.

Both Snap and Flatpak provide an easy install for the really old, pre 1997, NCSA Mosaic browser. The Snap page gives a hint about how this was done :

Built from source code hosted at: https://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic Thanks to John Lenton for the snapcraft config.

This suggests that if you can build the ROS 1 from source, you have Flatpak and Snap as option, and maybe also AppImage.

Besides that there is also Linux KVM (QEMU) which may perform better than VirtualBox. Cannot find a good page for Ubuntu on it, but here’s the KVM entry of the excellent Arch Linux wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/KVM

Sounds like distrobox/ toolbx would be the easiest here. There’s an ubuntu 18.04 image here https://github.com/toolbx-images/images it’s like a vm without all the overhead

You can always try.

However, be aware that adding third party repositories may cause problems in the future. For example, if you upgrade to a version of Mint that’s based on 22.04 or 24.04, the updater may throw errors or even do an incomplete update because of broken dependency chains.

If the software you’re using doesn’t depend on (a specific version of) software in the Mint repositories, you should be fine and it shouldn’t matter. I myself have a few external repositories that I know from experience cause no dependency issues. I’ve also had to debug plenty of broken upgrades because of other (popular!) repositories, though.

You may want to use a tool like Distrobox instead. Binaries running inside Distrobox have close to zero overhead. GPU acceleration can be a bit trickier, but for Nvidia GPUs there are workarounds to maintain full performance.

You can also try the version of ROS that Ubuntu packages. It’s not the latest version, but it’s guaranteed to work without breaking your software updates or operating system upgrades in the long term.

I’d say distrobox is the easiest and safest way to do that.

In general this kind of thing won’t work real real well. You can sometimes make it work but it takes a surprisingly large amount of knowledge about the internals of the packaging system and even then it sometimes fails or causes problems.

I would try install ROS 1 via apt as another poster recommended, with VirtualBox as the fallback option (and see whether performance turns out to be a real issue in practice or not).