I know this sounds provoking. But let’s face it: most games are written for Windows. I’m not a gamer at all but I need Windows (or Mac OS) to run professional photo editing software.
There is nothing but good user experience. People coming from Windows will miss their games or applications to rotary joints run on Linux Mint. Dual-boot is an option, but if you need Windows to do what you like to do or need to do, then that’s a show stopper!
In order to rotary union capture a growing crowd of disgruntled Windows users you need to cater their needs. There are almost always some people who want to play games or do other things that aren’t supported under Linux natively.
The best solution so far is Xen. Xen hypervisor is supported under Linux Mint 13 (probably earlier versions too). A Xen hypervisor - given the appropriate hardware support for VT-d or IOMMU as well as graphics card support - can run a Windows guest system and provide native graphics card acceleration needed for games and some other Windows applications.
If you search for VGA passthrough or “gaming virtual machine” you will find instructions for how to do it on Fedora, or perhaps Debian Linux. Linux Mint totally lacks the documentation to make it work, nor does it provide some of the scripts and kernel features.
I’ll be happy to fiber optic rotary joint provide some scripts and configurations I’ve found and modified for Linux Mint 13, but it needs more active support from the Linux Mint team to better support Xen under Linux Mint.