Doing this exposes issues especially in Neon, which deliberately hides Ubuntu-provided software by stripping their appstream data. But a lot of common software can still be found this way, such as Steam--but Steam from Ubuntu repos is broken in Neon (Bug 427464). Ultimately this hidden feature is a hack to work around distros with bad AppStream metadata, but I think this is not as bad a problem as it used to be, and users can now get apps from FlatHub or Snap much more easily.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/74
Git commit d1263d12a2fe5fa180f50026f213a23083aff70b by Aleix Pol Gonzalez, on behalf of Aleix Pol. Committed on 10/02/2021 at 16:32. Pushed by apol into branch 'master'. packagekit: stop supporting searches by package name Back when we started supporting appstream a lot of poorly maintained apps didn't appear in the databases, this made using Discover unbearable, hence adding the feature of searching the package name from the query. Despite being against our vision, it made sense back then. Nowadays applications should already have adopted AppStream in a way or another and this shouldn't apply anymore. M +1 -17 libdiscover/backends/PackageKitBackend/PackageKitBackend.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/commit/d1263d12a2fe5fa180f50026f213a23083aff70b
Git commit f8ae0a4ce23a2ead743711cbc96b9061813e30d1 by Aleix Pol Gonzalez, on behalf of Aleix Pol. Committed on 10/02/2021 at 16:32. Pushed by apol into branch 'Plasma/5.21'. packagekit: stop supporting searches by package name Back when we started supporting appstream a lot of poorly maintained apps didn't appear in the databases, this made using Discover unbearable, hence adding the feature of searching the package name from the query. Despite being against our vision, it made sense back then. Nowadays applications should already have adopted AppStream in a way or another and this shouldn't apply anymore. (cherry picked from commit d1263d12a2fe5fa180f50026f213a23083aff70b) M +1 -17 libdiscover/backends/PackageKitBackend/PackageKitBackend.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/commit/f8ae0a4ce23a2ead743711cbc96b9061813e30d1