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epistasis | on: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
I was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS land, was the best part of the IT experience with that client. (With how much I've moaned and complained about AWS over the years, that last sentence is the most damning thing I can possibly say about Microsoft's products.)
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inigyou | parent | next
Just pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server).

Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.

somat | root | parent | next
That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans account.

Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)

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epistasis | root | parent
The point of the account was multiplayer, unfortunately. Wanted a locked down account to play the game with a closed group of friends.

Ended up on Minecraft Education on the computer, eventually.

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brightball | parent | next
This is basically my experience.

I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.

I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.

Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.

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bigfishrunning | parent
what a shame; I only played minecraft when it was an alpha, and the .jar file ran just fine on my linux machine at the time.