Summary
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BedrockOnLinux 2.0 allows you to play on public servers and Realms on Linux with Microsoft account logins.
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Take advantage of Windows GDK/Proton support to make the native Bedrock Windows client run smoothly on Linux.
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Xbox friends, invites, cross-play servers, and Realms now work through WineGDK’s native Xbox identity.
For years, Linux players who wanted to play Minecraft Bedrock had to use a fairly restrictive version of the game. Although it allowed some online play, you couldn’t connect to cross-play servers with it. Fortunately, that has now changed, as a new version of BedrockOnLinux opens the door to playing on public servers.
BedrockOnLinux makes playing Minecraft on Linux much easier
You can also play with your friends.
The alarm sounded in the Linux Gaming Subreddit about the release of BedrockOnLinux 2.0. Before today, if you wanted to play Minecraft Bedrock, the best thing you could do was use MCPelauncher, which used the Google Play version of the game. While it technically allowed signing in to Microsoft accounts, Xbox Live authentication for the Android port was notoriously buggy and brittle. It frequently broke after game updates, leaving players locked out of Realms cross-play and public servers for months.
If you wanted a more stable experience, you had to run Windows in a VM and then start Minecraft in that. While it was possible, it wasn’t easy and a fairly powerful PC was needed for the game to run comfortably.
Fortunately, Microsoft recently stopped using the UWP framework in Minecraft for Windows and moved to GDK. This meant it was much more compatible with tools like Proton, which acts as a compatibility layer for Windows games on Linux. BedrockOnLinux 2.0 took advantage of this development and released the most feature-rich and easy-to-install versions of Minecraft Bedrock on Linux.
My personal favorite feature is the addition of Microsoft account logins, which opens up entire worlds (literally) to Linux gamers. like him BedrockOnLinux 2.0 GitHub Page explains it:
Native Xbox Identity: WineGDK implements the configuration of XGame, XUser, request signatures, gamertags, privileges, and the XSAPI context.
Online Play: Friends List, Invitations, Join Friends, Public Servers, and Realms all use that native identity. Realms receives a dedicated XSTS token for the Bedrock Realms audience instead of a generic Xbox token.
People on the Reddit thread are already reporting great results with this new version of Minecraft Bedrock, so if that was the last thing stopping you from fully migrating to Linux, give BedrockOnLinux 2.0 a try.
