I’ve installed a VM of Linux Mint 18 on my MBP using VirtualBox 5.0.24 on Mac OS X 10.11.5. No muss, no fuss. It just installed. I did it primarily just to see what would happen.

Some points of interest about the setup.

• Linux Mint 18 came with the VirtualBox Guest Additions pre-installed. That shared folder showed up after installation and first boot. I added the local login to the vboxsf group in order to see the contents of the folder.
• Linux Mint runs quite well. It should, being based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
• VirtualBox 5.0.24 is an excellent VM for various contemporary Linux distributions. I don’t run any other operating systems with it, so I can’t speak to them.

I like the dark theme of this version quite a bit. I’m also avoiding installing Java on this VM, choosing instead to install Google’s Go Language. My other language of choice on this VM is C++. I’m going back through my other VMs and removing Java and Java tools (particularly IDEs). I’ve got VIM and gedit for the work I need. And other tools to make sure my code is as robust as possible.