Even on Windows it can be a hassle because so many links will send you to Java 8 which Minecraft won't run on. Even the official links on minecraft.net sent you to the version that wouldn't run Minecraft for some time.

> Getting Java installed is always a bit of a headache

  apt install openjdk-21-jdk-headless

Or equivalent, no?

I wouldn't recommend doing it for mc. They keep changing and or using old jvms. What I do is I just go on oracles site and get the jdk they list that works, and run it directly from the folder. Also some distros do make it a pain lol.

Does it really matter? i've run Minecraft servers with Coretto 21 on Arm and had no issues at all even with the weird setup

Ive honestly never heard of coretto but it seems to be basically openjdk 21 under the hood so I don't see why that'd be a problem.

I haven't done this in forever, but last time the recommended OpenJDK answer was somehow not right. Got the Oracle one, had to figure out where you extract the tarball to, fix my PATH, yada yada.

^ this was my experience yeah. Though I didn't even bother with the PATH var I just used an absolute path to the damn binary because I was frustrated.

> didn't even bother with the PATH var

That sounds fine though. The PATH variable is a nicety for the user to not need to type long paths, really like using ~ for the home directory, not for program setup.

PATH was the last thing. I was more annoyed that the recommended way of installing Java in Linux is wrong. That wasted like 30min before I realized.

The instructions on and linked from https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server work fine — I downloaded the JAR file, installed OpenJDK 21 as above, and ran the given command.

I'll accept installing and running software on Linux has an unfamiliar procedure for those used to Windows or Mac.

I'm not sure if you've tried it or not, but sdkman.io is a really handy JVM ecosystem environment manager that makes getting Java (and other JVM langs) really easy to install and switch between.