All the cool kids are meeting their soul mates and getting gay married while their parents write angry blog posts about how they weren't invited to the wedding.

I play the original aether mod while listening to the yogpod and old paul saurs jr vids and do a little cry. This is the way to play.

I use Prism as a launcher, makes seperate instances and installing stuff a breeze.

Also a lot of (popular) mods will have cross modloader versions/ports, like Sodium has the (Neo)Forge ports Embeddium (AFAIK this is currently the best one) and Rubidium, and Controllable has a separate Fabric version in addition to Forge

To me, the correct way to play Minecraft is with a friend and pursuing silly, enjoyable goals.

Something I had a lot of fun doing is playing as "The Heart Tree" while my partner tried to support me. Essentially, I chose a tree I really liked, cut it down except for its lowest block (now designated "The Heart Block"), and I always would have to be touching or very close to logs which descend from the original tree.

I also had fun playing Modded Skyblock with my friend from high school, focusing on guiding progression and decorating (since I knew how to progress a lot better than he did), but not making too much progress personally.

To me, I intrinsically feel a drive to constantly chase progression, but ultimately find myself more fulfilled when I try and lay back and weave progression with genuine attention and enjoying the "unproductive" things, looking to make nifty floor patterns and building materials and interacting with friends.

I'm really glad you asked this. I've got a couple of kids, all they do is watch Minecraft videos on YouTube. I've got a lot of computer hardware lying around, I'd like to setup an old school server for them to play on. Bought a copy of Minecraft way back when but with modern licensing and mojahn whatever I doubt I can even still use it.,, where to start?

https://prismlauncher.org/ this is a good launcher but I'm sure most any will work (except polyMC hard avoid). I don't really play anymore either tho so idk

Preferably with telemetry disabled.

https://modrinth.com/mod/no-telemetry

I mean to ask, what is the way cool kids play Minecraft nowadays?

idk how the cool kids do it but as a big fucking nerd? i've been trying to get into Gregtech: New Horizons which is Minecraft for a very specific subset of autistic masochists who like to spend 18 years doing basic shit. I only really quit because every time I booted it up I could hear my ram chip crying

but the more weird stuff they add the more weirded out I feel.

what weird stuff?

Prism launcher with fabric, sodium, lithium and distant horizons

I mean to ask, what is the way cool kids play Minecraft nowadays? Are there cool alternative launchers or modpaks or a specific version or whatever I can play that's cooler than Microsoft Occupied Minecraft and are more fun?

minetest.net

The way to play minecraft is with mods, friends, and at least 2 types of drugs in your system

I use ATLauncher, it's broadly fine. Pretty easy to find and install modpacks from various sources. I was playing the Create Astral pack but it kept annoying me into tweaking it until I gave up, so now I'm waiting for the hexbear server to launch.

Pretty sure the 7600K that I have is even worse than the 2600 and it runs fine on my machine. You do have to enable the thing to allow it to use enough ram. This guide seems to cover how to do that in a bunch of different launchers.

Install Cocricot. Make comfy cottagecore cafes and apartments.

I don't know either. I recently got it on my phone when it was very cheap in play store.