Minecraft JAVA Edition for Linux (especially Mint)

Minecraft is a one of the popular games and you can play it with various devices. If you are Linux user and want to play Minecraft, you can install and launch it through this story. This story is one example to set up correctly, someone may not be able to set up in this way.

Download Minecraft file

Firstly, you register Mojang account. It’s free and easy.
After registration, you buy Minecraft.

Click buy button

Choose your device, almost Linux user will choice PC.

Choice your device: PC

Choose your OS, this story’s reader should choice Linux.

Choice OS: Linux

Click Download button. (I already bought Minecraft, so re-download button was appeared.)

Download Minecraft file

Choose your distribution. In my case, I use Linux Mint, I chose “other” and download “Minecraft.tar.gz” file. If you use Ubuntu, you will choose “debian” and download “Minecraft.deb”file.

Choice your distribution

You can download Minecraft.tar.gz in any place. In this story, “~/Downloads/Minecraft.tar.gz” is downloaded directory.

Install JAVA 8

You have to install Java 8, if you want to play Minecraft Java edition. Access to Oracle home page. Scroll to “Java SE 8" and click “JDK Download”. Please be careful Java version, Java 8. You may have Oracle log in. If you do not have Oracle account, you will register it.

Linux user should click “jdk-*-linux-x64.tar.gz” and download it any directory. In this story, “~/Downloads/jdk-*-linux-x64.tar.gz” is downloaded place.
You may be asked to log in Oracle account. If you can not do it, you need to reboot your computer or retry after time.

Open terminal and unzip java tar file. In this case, unzip directory is “/usr/lib/jvm”.

sudo mkdir /usr/lib/jvm
cd /usr/lib/jvm
tar zxvf ~/Download/jdk-8u281-linux-x64.tar.gz

To confirm installing, type this command.

java -version

The result is like here.

Launching Minecraft

Next, unzip Minecraft file.

mkdir ~/minecraft
tar zxvf ~/Download/Minecraft.tar.gz

Executable file is under “minecraft/minecraft-launcer”.

cd ~/minecraft/minecraft-launcher
./minecraft-launcher

If you did not make directory “minecraft”, the minecraft-launcher directory would make current directory. Unzip it under your convenience directory.

When Minecraft launch upper command, you can play Minecraft soon.

However, sometimes it is too long time to launch. In such a case, you also can install the Minecraft snap package. Visit this site, like this page is open.

minecraft-launcher-ot

Scroll under and click “installing snap documentation”.

click here to install snap

Next page, choose your distribution. In my case, I use Linux Mint.

Choose your distribution

Next page explains how to install snap on Linux. You can install snap in that way. This command is copied Linux Mint version.

sudo rm /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
sudo apt update
sudo apt install snapd

Reboot your computer. After reboot, you type this command to install minecraft-launcher snap. (The site wrote tutorial HelloWorld snap to confirm installing snapd correctly. If you are concerned about installing, you execute that step.)

sudo snap install minecraft-launcher-ot
NOTE: this was updated from minecraft-launcher-ot to launcher-ot-minecraft

When you execute minecraft-launcer snap, you type this.

./minecraft-launcher-ot

Minecraft will launch!

Reference: How to Install Minecraft on Linux? by David Morelo