My internet searches lead me to believe it’s possible to get the Minecraft “bedrock edition” running on Linux. Any pros here have any tips/tricks before I tell my kids that I’m a genius and it can be done? They want to play with their friends who game on consoles/mobile devices. Also, why does minecraft seem so odd with editions and launchers?!
this isn’t necessarily true. I haven’t played in a while, but java servers using custom implementations like paper or bungeecord can use Geyser to allow Bedrock clients to connect to Java servers. There’s some things that are wierd or don’t work, as there’s a bit of feature parity issues between versions, they’re not the same game. But you can play together.
I used to play on a server with it and people would login with bedrock accounts (free with java purchase) so they could have an alt for dailies and storage.
Incredibly, on most console versions, you can only connect to specific servers. You have to do some DNS shenanigans to connect to a custom server that reroutes you to whatever server you want. Or at least, that’s how it worked a couple years ago when I last had the displeasure of dealing with Minecraft Bedrock.
So even if you bite the bullet of setting up a server with Geyser, your friends would have to be willing to mess around a fair bit to connect to it.