Since there is no native launcher for Linux yet, that leaves Linux users unable to play the stable versions at all
As a workaround for Arch Linux, you can use the old launcher available in AUR as "minecraft-launcher" (instead of "minecraft"): simply type "yaourt -S minecraft-launcher".
For other distros, there probably are similar packages or maybe you could extract the launcher from the tarball in the PKGBUILD: minecraft-launcher-2.0.579.tar.gz
Felix Na
As a workaround for Arch Linux, you can use the old launcher available in AUR as "minecraft-launcher" (instead of "minecraft"): simply type "yaourt -S minecraft-launcher".
For other distros, there probably are similar packages or maybe you could extract the launcher from the tarball in the PKGBUILD: minecraft-launcher-2.0.579.tar.gz