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

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

Ubuntu themselves package ROS, it's a little out of date from the latest (1.16 vs 1.18) https://packages.ubuntu.com/jammy/ros-desktop

Try apt update && apt install ros-desktop

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.

I don't have much to comment on native installs that hasn't already been said, but if you go with a VM, please don't use VirtualBox. It's a pile of hot garbage that pales in comparison to the already existing, kernel-level virtualization offered by KVM/QEMU. Use a package like virt-manager for KVM/QEMU based VMs and your experience and performance will be infinitely better. The Linux kernel has KVM built in for a reason, so take advantage of that.

Otherwise, Distrobox is a great recommendation, as are many of the other install methods listed in these comments.

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).

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.

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.

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