Hope these kinds of questions are allowed here. On this occasion I'm just looking for a straight answer.

For a university course I need to install ROS - software for doing robotics stuff. Specifically, I need ROS 1 - which is no longer being updated, as ROS 2 is now the focus. The installation instructions are here: https://wiki.ros.org/Installation/Ubuntu

The instructions from the course material say that only Ubuntu 18 would work, though the ROS wiki says Ubuntu 20.04 is the target. Either way, it doesn't seem to be available for Ubuntu 22.04 and therefore Linux Mint 21, which is what I'm running.

The course instructions generally gives 3 options:

1. Install ROS on a VirtualBox virtual machine
2. Install on Windows using WSL
3. Install on a real Ubuntu 18 system

Right now I'm going to use VirtualBox to get started, but I'd really prefer to run it natively and I'm worried about performance. Is there a simple way to download and run software intended for Ubuntu 20.04 on Linux Mint 21.3?

Edit: thank you all for the great suggestions! I got stuck on an unrelated problem (ran out of storage space) but I'm sure your suggestions will work once I fix that. Forgive me for not replying individually, you're all awesome and I don't have anything to add other than "thank you" :)