It’s not making it worse. They like anime, so they have an anime girl as the mascot; a very tame one too.
But some people freak out about it.
It’s actually pretty nice in some situations.
One thing that bites me about Loupe / Image Viewer is that it always goes through images in alphabetical order, despite the sort option you have set in nautilus.
Sushi does go through items using the same sort option set in nautilus.
Though it can be finicky with videos, so I don’t use it for that.
It's a good question. Really the only thing that would have been completely broken if moving to a new version are game mods, which are written in Java. Everything else could be converted to work with a new C++ based version.
Though doing so would result in a lot of new bugs, systems would have different behavior leading to broken mob farms and redstone. I think this would be the main reason. Keep Java around until the Bedrock Edition could handle these worlds with minimal issues.
However, Bedrock involved into a very corporate product. Microtransactions, ads, etc. Java Edition players would be angry if they were forced to move to this version.
Another factor is that Microsoft really doesn't support Linux and MacOS systems. They likely didn't want to add support for them in Bedrock Edition.
I looked into this a bit more. It turns out that Metadata Cleaner was marked end of life by the owner because it's no longer being maintained. This is different from the more common scenario where an app is using an end of life runtime. I guess Discover decides to remove apps that explicitly marked as end of life.
Still, it's a poor UX to not give the user the choice. You may be able to work around the issue by pinning Metadata Cleaner, either using the CLI or Warehouse, an app to graphically manage flatpaks.
@Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de