I can confirm this behaviour with launcher 1.6.84-j for vanilla Minecraft on Ubuntu 16.04.3, using both JDK 8u131 and 8u151.
Problem for me as well:
Ubuntu 16.04.3 (LTS) 64-bit
Launcher version 1.6.82-j
Can't launch anything except for the latest snapshot version.
Launcher version 2.0.1005 does not work, as the library libicui18n.so.57 is not available on the system.
libicui18n.so.57
William Noad
I can confirm this behaviour with launcher 1.6.84-j for vanilla Minecraft on Ubuntu 16.04.3, using both JDK 8u131 and 8u151.