In case you hadn’t caught up on the news, the founder of PolyMC – a popular Minecraft launcher – was exerting toxic behavior towards the other developers and to the project itself. Fortunately we have our alternatives. Prism Launcher happens to be one of them. This launcher was actually created by the developers who got kicked out of the PolyMC project by the creator. It’s open-source, mostly written in C++, using Qt as the frontend, and has the GPLv3 license.

As the project is in its’ early stages, I wasn’t even able to create a Minecraft profile (I’ll be honest, I’ve never touched Minecraft in my life). As a result I couldn’t play online. It works with an offline account though. So far it’s looking very nice. You can choose between several instances, from vanilla Minecraft, to CurseForge, Modrinth, and others. You can also import your own from a zip file. Stable as well as experimental releases can be chosen, and you can use Forge, Fabric, Quilt, or LiteLoader mod loaders.

New Minecraft instance in Prism Launcher

There’s also plenty of different options to choose from, including the application’s theme color, whether or not to use your system’s discrete GPU, toggle MangoHUD, toggle GameMode, window size and height, and everything in-between.

Note that in order to play Minecraft online, you’ll need to log in with a Microsoft account. You can also use a Mojang account, but apparently this is for offline use only. You can play offline without needing to log in to anything.

Minecraft main menu

Builds can be found on the Actions page on their GitHub. When you select a build, there’s an AppImage available for Linux. There’s also a portable build that you can download. Technically Prism Launcher is also available on the AUR, but I don’t recommend installing this way for the time being, as I was unable to download the PlaceholderMC package, which it requires.

Check out the project on GitHub. Installation instructions will be provided there soon, as well as their own website. In the meantime you check out their Discord server.

Minecraft in-game