It's not so much a bug as it is a crash issue between the launcher and the game.

Whenever I load up an older version of Minecraft on Linux Mint (Ubuntu) cinnamon 16 on my laptop and even TRY to press play, it immediately crashes and confronts me with an error message that says "We're sorry for the crash. If it's a bug between the launcher and the game, you should report it right away." Then it says the Error Code (which is always zero), and I load a newer version of the game and ta-da! it works amazingly well.