Arrrr my fellow pirates. Since I'm very unexperienced with the seas I ask for you guys, where can I get Minecraft from for Arch Linux. It's not because I'm not willing to pay 20€ but because Microsoft is a giant bitch and I'm not willing to put money in their mouth(especially after they changed their privacy policy).
PollyMC is a Prism Launcher fork but with "offline mode" and works perfectly on my opinion. I recommend downloading the flatpak version as the appimage asks you for certain versions of Java that are easy to install but sometimes gets a little complicated.
And yes, Micro$hit can eat shit. I personally bought Minecraft but on the day I was forced to migrate my Mojang account to a Micro$oft account with the threat that "If I don't do it I'll lose access to my game" I delete my Mojang account and use PollyMC since.
PolyMC had some drama a while ago with a hostile takeover by a dev. The other original devs forked it and are now continuing the development at Prism launcher
edit: whoops! i made an error reading and didnt notice the two l's
There were some talks to migrating all PolyMC Flatpak installations to Prism Launcher, which was achieved by marking PolyMC as outdated on Flathub's repo and marking Prism Launcher as the newer version, which will result in Flatpak clients replacing PolyMC with Prism Launcher while moving data over. The only thing users would notice is that the icon and name on the apps list changed, since all worlds and instances would stay in place.
Unfortunately I think they didn't continue with this decision.
Using this method to bypass the Microsoft account requirement on pure Prism Launcher is better than relying on a downstream project, IMO. Especially since PollyMC's releases are lagging behind Prism Launcher (which is expected for downstream projects), and the latest release 7.2 was behind for an entire month.
The binary is in the releases (e.g. Flatpak version), I guess you'll have to update manually though, since they don't have a Flatpak repository of their own that you can add
That you get through the launcher, of course it's not hosted on GitHub, you can download several different versions of Minecraft from it, there's no trouble with that.
I never wondered how they get them exactly, but I think it might be a direct download from the official sources and then some patches applied after the fact to "crack" it (do note I could be totally off on this one).
You also get mod support with it, I instantly got the gamepad mod for example and it's all been working flawlessly, though the documentation could use some work, it was quite confusing to me.
As far as I know, Minecraft itself is avaliable for download publicly, you don't even need to patch it to play. You just need to supply it some fake account data and tell it to work offline.
No official servers support, of course, but that's about it.
The funny thing is, this mechanism came from Mojang, and at this point they can't even do anything about it. If they stop providing downloads without an account or implement some anti-piracy features, people will just use the latest official version and mod it. And it may be not even the latest one, there are tons of players on 1.7.10 and 1.12.2, just because modders love them.
Sure, they can try and push their Bedrock version... But nobody is playing on that piece of crap.
Sure, they can try and push their Bedrock version... But nobody is playing on that piece of crap.
As somebody who plays Minecraft very often on my phone, I can say Bedrock Edition would've been a very good platform if they just didn't aggressively push their Marketplace BS.
That's not a proper Bedrock port however, it's the Android version with some patches on top. It requires you to own Minecraft on the Play Store in order to use it.
This is one of the best solutions in my opinion. Being able to use Multiple instances with separate .minecraft folders is super handy, especially for mods or playing on older versions.