If you are on Debian, or a Debian-based distro like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc, and if you have tried to recently use the Minecraft.deb installer, you will find that it gives an error about missing dependencies. Some people have chosen to use the non-distro Linux specific tarball for install Minecraft Java Edition on Linux. This solution does work okay but there is actually an easy fix for the Debian file.

Citing these forum posts, which itself references this, the solution is to extract the deb file, open up a certain file in a text editor, modify one line of text, and to recompile the deb file.

    The .deb package contains a typo (at least for Debian) in the dependencies list for libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0).

    To solve the problem the control file must be modified:

    Original dependency:

    libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0)

    Corrected one:

    libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0) | libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0)

    The following steps solve the problem:

    Open a terminal, go to the directory were Minecraft.deb is and execute as root:

    mkdir tmpdir
    dpkg-deb --raw-extract Minecraft.deb tmpdir

    Open tmpdir/DEBIAN/control with your favorite text editor, find

    libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0)

    and replace it with

    libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0) | libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0)

    Save the changes. Then,

    dpkg-deb --build tmpdir Minecraft-corrected.deb

    Now you can dpkg --install Minecraft-corrected.deb, and apt-get --fix-broken install if needed (if there was any complain about dependencies with the install step), or use any other helper as gdebi or a Software center for installing it.

In essence: libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0) must become libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>=2.22.0) | libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 (>= 2.22.0)

This problem seems to be more than a year old. User enigma9o7 wrote on 4/27/2025 that the problem is not because of a misspelling of a package name but the need for Minecraft.deb to include two package names instead of one as a dependency to account for differences between debian 13 and previous debian versions handling libgdk-pixbuf. It is not debian’s fault, except for putting out debian 13, which nobody is mad about and has little reason to be mad about. Since Ubuntu and Linux Mint are downstream from debian, they are also affected.