It depends on how much RAM you got and storage you are willing to sacrifice- mOS will kill Virtualbox if you use too much.
You can do this, its pretty easy. There is a version of VirtualBox for Apple Silicon. As above it depends how much RAM you have on your host laptop. You'd need to allocate 3-4Gb to Mint for it to be reasonable to use in a VM.Oh, I was just thinking about installing Virtual Box and then installing Linux inside that. But it was just a thought.
It sounds like it would be more trouble than it’s worth. No biggie.