Buy a Windows OS licence, boot-camp a windows partition on your Mac, and check for mapped drivers with the graphic card provider.

But do double-check that the boot-camp version is compatible with the Windows OS version you want to install, though!

For past quite some years, I genuinely thought this combined both worlds pretty well.

+1 for Wine and PlayOnMac

Please note that I have had two major boot-camp disasters, personally, hence the recommendation above.

1:

The first disaster was when I upgraded my iMac, after Windows XP was no longer the supported Microsoft OS, but I saw no reason to upgrade to Windows 7 because I liked XP well enough.

However, I grabbed the most recent / available boot-camp version, and ended up with an error blue-screen on my iMac with the XP installation disc stuck inside.

Thank goodness I could call someone in the know, so I force started pressing the system key and "alt" - for alternative disk, he said for memory aid - and could return to the Mac partition, and delete the Windows one.

The next day I bought Windows 7 installation discs, though.

2:

This one I can laugh about at hind-sight, but it was most painful when it happened.

Thinking I had learned my "check your boot-camp version" lesion, I quite innocently thought I should be able to split my Windows partition into two, and trial boot as Mac OS, XP, and Win 7.

I must boast I was much more successful, as far as XP installation goes, as it did not end in blue screen error.

Only that my XP erased my Win7 totally, with everything that was there...

I still think tri-booting is a reasonable wish, but unless boot-camp has been upgraded accordingly - do no try it!

I would say that a VM would be your best bet if you've got an install disk of Windows and an unused valid license key to go with it. Otherwise, WINE is the way to go.

Why is VM better than boot-camp, the latter being the default tool provided by the actual computer manufacturer?

Well, I'll partially take that back and say that for me personally, it's the convenience of being better able to manage and organize my Windows partition. If I want, I can easily move a VM to a bigger volume, resize it, and/or save snapshots of it to backup or rollback to, if need be.

However, for most people who likely aren't going to mess around with their Windows partition, and if you want the absolute best performance possible (and willing to trade in some convenience), Boot Camp is the obvious choice.

I get it.

I always preferred "just once" single and largish Windows partition with each iMac - minus my unfortunate ambition to have two separate Windows versions running in parallel.

My minimal intervention way might be more weak to corruption, I admit, because I am not very convicted that the ongoing Windows updates are very smooth with boot-camp.

I btw tried XP on virtual machine on my Windows 7 on iMac (after that blue screen incident) to be able to game Baldur's Gate - before I discovered gog.com. That is why I am here.:-)

My issue back them was that the result was on a window. I never could get BG full screen like that. Should have tried it on the Mac OS maybe?



Edit: "I get it," in first line: as in why you like VM, to be clear. The rest is to explain why there could be the other sort, lot.

bootcamp cannot be used on triple boot. for that you have to check rEFIt.... but each you you upgrade your mac you have to be sure that rEFIt is still compatible.

Anyway there is no need to triple boot...
linux and old windows (like xp), works really well on VM

I know this to my cost, now, and would stick with two OS per iMac policy. Linux is too hard, for me, perso, I fear.

But thx for posting - was at Expo Milano, and still feel quite impressed and just European about it, actually.

Ubuntu is really easy, it's just not easy to find some software (for me the problem is that I cannot use Unity3d on Linux... but it will be ported soon).
The real problem on Linux is that there are many low quality distro and no official linux distro. Various DE (desktop environment) that fill the various distros are also often incompatible with each other. This means that the terminal is the most convenient way to standardize the method of use of the various distros, this means that many will not be able to use linux.
It also means that many developers are forced to build only one or two of the many distros, because it is very difficult to support them all.

With a official linux distro (ubuntu for example), it could be easier to support linux.

The Milan expo was a good initiative, I was there too on July 2015.

I was always under the impression that Ubuntu was the de facto "official" Linux distro. At the very least, I was hoping that it would be the banner under which Linux geeks could rally to gain serious mindshare among the mainstream computing public.

I'm hoping it can still be that. Unity was bad enough, but the Amazon ads in 12.10 were enough to drive me away completely.

Well... Canonical is the only company that tried to make a decent user-friendly distro and if you buy a windows pc you always get many trial program (but if you buy a mac you will not get any ads... why? you already paid for that).
Also I really like Unity now (the first Unity was bad, but now it is not), I wish ubuntu was the official Linux distro unfortunately it is not so.

Could you pleas explain "distro" pray? It seems specific abbreviation, but it is not familiar to me.

Distribution. The combination of the Linux kernel, GNU tools, packaging system, and other apps that make something like Ubuntu distinct from something like Fedora or Slackware.

linux kernel is the same for all linux distro but each distribution: different desktop enviroment + different packaging system and others minor thing.