I was so happy when I discovered Prism because I did not want to install multiple layers of garbage to get Curse modpacks working like I had to on Windows. I still have friends with Overwolf running in the background!
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Linux Gaming
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FYI Prism Launcher is a Minecraft launcher ( !prismlauncher@lemmy.world )
*Data is based on 1908 publicly shared crash logs
It is most commonly installed with Flatpak.
The most common graphics kernel driver is amdgpu
I'm not sure if I remember this right, but I think there was also a while where it was integrated into the Twitch desktop client
EDIT: Yeah, you needed the Twitch client (with Twitch account) to be able to download modpacks
Oh yeah! Fuck that noise too!
If I installed it on a Linux machine and had mods, can someone on a console join and have the mods work?
Spouse plays on console, and it would make it more likely I'd like to play if I could add some kind of mods
Java edition (the one Prism and most other launchers run) and Bedrock edition (the one on consoles) are incompatible with each other unfortunately. Also Bedrock doesn't support modding afaik
What’s prism launcher?
An open source Minecraft launcher with the ability to manage multiple instances, accounts and mods. Focused on user freedom and free redistributability.
If this isn't just an artifact of the way data was collected, I suspect it's not because Linux users are more likely to install alternative launchers, but because they're much less tolerant of non-FOSS software in general.
Anecdotally, most Windows users I know use a custom launcher, but they use proprietary ones like CurseForge or Feather (both of which show advertisements; something no self-respecting Linux user would accept, but which has been normalized in Windows).
I use it on windows. Literally can't get the java version to run on windows without it (and I actually own the game)
Many people on windows don't know about it tho. PrismLauncher is vastly superior to the dogshit launcher mojang provides. I'm pretty sure there would be more windows users if it was more known.
Prism was the one my friends had me use on Windows, besides CurseForge I don't really know about other launchers lol.
I've been around, there's the technic launcher, ATLauncher (that one was the go to for making packa for playing with friends), the FTB launcher, as mentioned the curseforge launcher was part of the twitch app for a while (I think it was also something like the Curse app before that?), and then Prism Launcher is actually a fork of a fork of MultiMC, but the in-between fork was a little bit of a controversial mess that fell to a hostile takeover by one of the maintainers - which spurred the remaining maintainers to make what I see as the best launcher currently available. Oh, and I think modrinth might have a launcher now?
Oh, yeah, I also remember the old Minecraft launcher, I think there was a modded version of that with support for multiple profiles so you didn't have to switch mods manually!
It's funny how much history there is if you go digging into things like this, and I'm sure I missed a lot.
Haha, I just installed prism (via flatpak) to set it up and see what my Linux performance was like compared to my prior Windows performance a couple days ago.
Don't strongly recall my Windows performance, but pretty sure Linux was doing better, frametimes seemed more consistent for the same result. Also, man, Prism is still the best, such a great way to manage a lightly modded Minecraft instance, with just a few handpicked mods, shaders, and resource packs.
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What if it crashes way more often in Linux?
Or what if it crashes way more often on Windows? Also, can you disable sharing of the crash logs? Are Windows users or Linux users more likely to share the logs? We don't have enough data, this graph could be skewed either way. Though it's probably mostly accurate.
The crash log sharing is opt in, as far as I recall
It is
It's anecdotal , but I heard that Linux bug reports are actually a problem for some game developers. When 1% of your customer base submits 10-20% of your bug reports, middle managers get upset. Apparently several games have had Linux support dropped because of this.
While Linux often has more bugs in games (and so more reports), Linux users have also been conditioned to report bugs better. It helps a lot in FOSS etc.
Yeah, I've also heard that Linux users report more bugs, but including bugs that are not Linux specific. So they are helpful to the Windows users in a way.
I just wanted to add to what you said by sharing this bit of information, because I do find it very interesting to see. I hope I don’t come off as argumentative, because that’s not my intent.
I recall this post on Reddit from an indie game developer of the game “ΔV: Rings of Saturn”. They said how 38% of the bug reports for their game came from Linux users, despite only making up 5.8% of the purchases for the game.
It does make it seem like the Linux version of their game was buggier, but of the some 400 bug reports they got, only three were specific to the Linux build. In this case, getting more bug reports from Linux users did not indicate the game was buggier on Linux.
I will not say this is the case for all cross-OS games because this is just one example, but it seems that Linux users are more inclined to provide bug reports than Windows users are, and that doesn’t necessarily mean Linux versions of software are buggier. In some (maybe even many, I don’t know) cases, the Linux version certainly is buggier or performs worse due to developers spending less time on it or other reasons I’m not aware of, but it’s not always the case. The higher volume of bug reports from Linux users may give the perception that the Linux version is buggier.
And, as the developer mentioned, those bugs exist whether or not they’re aware of them. I’d argue that the decision by some developers to remove Linux versions because of the higher volume of bug reports is short-sighted because many of those bugs are not going to be OS-dependent, and now there are fewer reports of them.
You've basically summed up what I was trying to say better than I did. To Linux users, bug reports are a good thing. They help fix things. To middle management, bug reports are a bad thing, they hurt their bonuses.
One group needs to change, and Linux users are impressively stubborn.
That’s essentially it. I suspect this is probably a bigger problem when profit is what drives the development of the game rather than passion. I know it’s more nuanced than that because profit-driven developers can still be passionate and care about the quality of the product, but I personally suspect that profit-first development is where there’s less tolerance for bug reports. And, keep in mind that I’m still speculating, but I suspect that many of those profit-first devs are probably the same ones that rush releases… and we know what that generally does to the “final” product.
Bug reports really are a good thing. It’s as you said. One group needs to change, and I don’t think it’s the Linux users. Some developers consider it free Q/A and free testing, but like you said - if bonuses and rep are on the line, well it’s easier to see how this sort of thing happens where Linux versions of software get pulled because of the volume of bug reports. I think it’s dishonest, really. Many of the big names have the developer volume to make this less of an issue.
Anecdotal of course, but I use it regularly and it has never crashed. I'm using EndeavourOS.
This is about Minecraft crashing, not the launcher itself
Oh, so the Minecraft crash logs show which launcher is used? I had no idea! Interesting.
Kind of, the launcher inserts some information at the start of the log with general information such as hardware, mods used, and launcher version & source. I've written a parser that extracts that information.
It's available in the software catalog with a click of the button in Linux. Also, it makes running mods simple.
I use this on Windows and honestly it blew my mind how amazing it is compared to the regular launcher. Like it’s one of those things that I have to tell everybody about because it’s that great.
People willing to play expert modpacks are also people who are willing to tinker with Arch Linux.
Seriously though, there's so many parallels between modded Minecraft and Linux: they're foss, they have a billion packages with a billion dependencies, weird bugs pop up and you work around them, and of course, the skill set to automate things in a game like that (or factorio, satisfactory, etc) lend themselves to using console commands and scripts and such.
That said, it's also just easier to play Minecraft on Linux with a launcher, haha.
Been off MC since m$ ruined it. Only luanti and voxelibre now. Im having fun again!
Its not a 100% perfect copy, but it works flawlessly, and servers are dead simple to setup. And everything is totally customizable.
I refuse to pay m$ or use an account from them. They already ripped me off twice for the game (because I never moved it from mojang because i wasnt gaming when that transition happened, and they will not give it back), so screw em.
(Psst, there’s a fork of prismlauncher called freesmlauncher which bypasses the need to pay micros*ft to play Minecraft) you can’t join servers that have their online-mode set to true, which is 99.9999% of public servers, but if you host your own, you can disable it and let anyone join
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Fuck MS but I will say once you own the game you don’t have to give them money. I bought it on Java from Mojang years ago and didn’t play during the changeover but was able to move it to an MS account and not pay again.
Now with Prism launcher it’s incredible and I’ll never go back to the bloated launcher.
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I am surprised that amd is at the top, but the nvidea arbitrary restrictions and tax are quite high.
Let’s keep passing those Linux numbers up!
Side note: why is there a presumably third party “Minecraft launcher”, doesn’t the app just open? What does this do?
minecraft has a vanilla launcher too, because the game started out as a java applet so you need a shitton of flags to actually get the game to run normally. also there's no way to login to an account in the actual game.
anyway, prism is a mod-loading launcher. it integrates with curseforge and modrinth to allow you to install, build and distribute mods and modpacks.
Oh cool, thanks!
I guess that explains a bit more why Linux is so high, but still good to see.
Wow, I thought it was the opposite! That the majority of users are on Linux.
Or maybe it is the case, because the stats have a very limited dataset.
When I first switched to linux and tried to run the standard Minecraft Java client, i couldn't get it to output sound, so I tried Prism launcher and it just worked. And being able to manage mods nicely is really useful
Well, PolyMC (PrismLauncher antecessor) was forked from MultiMC after its dev had a big disagreement over how it was packaged in Linux Distros, so I suppose it makes sense the primary audience is Linux
It's based on crash logs so you're assuming all OPs have the same rate of crashes, which is probably false.
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Prism and Modrinth have been a godsend! It is so easy to manage mods and updating
Does anyone else have the issue where Prism takes forever to launch an instance? I'll try to give more details when I get back on my computer.
i have seen people dualboot linux just because minecraft runs so much better compared to windows
I hope I didn't spam the crash records, because a week ago I kept running into errors with Prism launcher. Turns out that my Microsoft account somehow got disconnected, found through digging and running the app through the terminal. It was reported in the GUI as an "unknown error." Please, tell me if it's the Microsoft component that's failing! (Maybe I should make a PR for that...)
Installed it recently when the legacy launcher stopped working.
I use it since the login requirements are insane for vanilla Minecraft.
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