Had to install the feed the beast app to play their stupid modpacks. It was ugly, had ads taking up a quarter of the screen at any time, and it used up a gig of RAM at idle.
On top of that, the launcher would run while the game was running, meaning you had a shitty electron app always running alongside the RAM hoarder that is minecraft.
Really just wish they'd let me install their packs on prism, a far superior qt-based launcher that uses my system's theme.
They removed it in a recent update because they were told to by the FTB team. There's a legacy FTB section for much older packs, but it doesn't have the pack I want to play.
I mean, worst case scenario, you could always try and use the launcher just to download the mods/install and then cut and paste the Minecraft install over to your launcher of choice. That said, I don't know for certain if that works largely because I've never really played any FTB modpacks, and I've always been EXTREMELY picky with Minecraft launchers for a very similar reason (Curseforge's official app has ads and I don't trust that "Overwolf" thing they also make you install to not be spyware data harvesting).
Interesting. Turns out I'm still using version 6.3, which is the version just before they removed the ability to download FTB packs. Thanks for the heads-up, I'm certainly not updating now.
One thing I can confirm is that if you can find a way to install release 6.3, FTB downloads still work perfectly fine.