Certainly Bootcamp is useful but unnecessary in this situation. The Ubuntu universe does make a dedicated OS for both powerpc and intel based Mac which does require a little tweaking to give the look and feel of Linux Mint. Since Mint in fully based on Ubuntu alterations are easy to do. Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS for Mac available here: cdimage dot ubuntu dot com/lubuntu/releases/14.04.2/release
Yes you can till version 10.9.5 Mac OS Mavericks. For this you just need to use boot camp from Apple and create a dedicated partition on your hard drive. Easy to do. Starting Yosemite version of mac OS X (10.x.y) boot camp is only compatible with Windows 8 and above.
Bootcamp for the win. I run Trisquel, Windows, and the Mac OS on my mac. I have a iMac with a i7 3.4 ghz proc, 1 tb ssd, and 32 gb's of ram. I find myself using VM's while I'm in the Mac side, via parallels. I have one older mac that I'm just going to straight install Zorin or Trisquel linux on, without any other OS to fall back on. Dual booting, using bootcamp is still a valid and time tested way to run windows, and then reboot, and run mac.
all apple laptops which are older than 2014 will accept installing windows 7 , newer laptops will only accept boot from windows 8 or 10 i have already done that for a few clients , remove OS X and replace it with windows , you would get a very good performance windows laptop for 100% compatibility make sure you run bootcamp , let the setup download the drivers from apple server , save the files on a flash drive and use it after installing windows