Versions of Minecraft: Java Edition that are incompatible with Java 11 are crashing on Linux when installing via the .deb file, such as 1.8.9. This is due to the fact that one of the dependencies of the Minecraft launcher that is installed when running the .deb file is the "default-jre" package, which has recently moved over to Java 11 after using Java 8 for quite some time. As such, anyone who uses the .deb file to install the Minecraft launcher cannot use older versions of Minecraft that rely on Java 8 to work. I was only able to fix the issue after manually installing Java 8 as well as the Minecraft launcher. I suggest that the launcher download Java 8 into the .minecraft folder and use that when launching versions of the game that require Java 8 to work properly, such as 1.8.9.
Linked issues
duplicates 1
Comments 2
We are aware of this problem, and looking in to shipping JRE in a better way. We are tracking this issue as MCL-15385, see that for possible workarounds.
Thanks for taking the time to report this!
can you explain how you did that?? (I should probs say how did you run the launcher on java 8??)