PolyMC VS PrismLauncher

No, not really. No one was in charge at the beginning. It was a community project with multiple people having the administrative role at the same time. LennyMcLennington was one of the contributers, but not really an important one. But he removed the administrative rights from the actually important people. Devs like flowln and Scrumplex played a much bigger role. Even after half a year being the only developer at the PolyMC-Project Lenny still heasn't caught up with what other conributers had done in a few months before. See: https://github.com/PolyMC/PolyMC/graphs/contributors

Could I suggest trying a different launcher such as PolyMC? You can get this on deck in Linux linkand sign into your microsoft account to access Java. This version also has the benefit of you being able to get modpacks.

It's still open source, the repo hasn't moved. https://github.com/PolyMC/PolyMC/

The issue is: the main developer freaked out, made a post ranting about political bs, kicked everyone from the GitHub project and now it's been 2 months since it hasn't been updated. The developers who used to contribute to "PolyMC" moved from the "PolyMC" project to the "PrismLauncher" one after the drama.

There was no prompting or provocation towards lenny at all. The code of conduct existed for ages before lenny deleted it on oct 17 2022: https://github.com/PolyMC/PolyMC/commits/358f080c76dbdfc65f32e08448a5e38b78d2bab0/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

PolyMC: https://polymc.org/

for polymc literally yes git commit (got deleted but title is there)

First, it's gio that handles trash in SteamOS. Second, after digging into PolyMC's code, it also leverages trash. Was added roughly 7 months ago in this commit: https://github.com/PolyMC/PolyMC/commit/02f30de1c11fa53e61c199032a3280afe618e3b2

Change meta server to https://meta.prismlauncher.org/v1/ and MSA client id to c36a9fb6-4f2a-41ff-90bd-ae7cc92031eb in settings to keep using PolyMC. Both of these are by the main contributors that now moved to https://github.com/PlaceholderMC/PrismLauncher.

The falsely banned devs of PolyMC have created a new Launcher and are working hard to push a stable release right now (Github - Discord)

there's one on the prism launcher github https://github.com/PlaceholderMC/PrismLauncher

It's completely unrelated to PolyMC, but the safe fork from PolyMC's last "safe" code state is being worked on under the name "Prism Launcher" (initially called "PlaceholderMC").

From what I know, PolyMC and other launchers pull libraries needed to run the game when first setting up new instances and also periodically update those. Even if you don't update PolyMC, these libraries could be updated by the owner, replaced with versions that contain malicious code. If you want to keep using it, but be safe just in case, this issue contains a screenshot showing how to replace the metadata server, including a working alternative by the old contributors now working on the fork called Prism Launcher.