Thanks!

So I gather Microsoft has renamed Bedrock Edition to just "Minecraft" and then there's "Minecraft: Java Edition".

What's the player base split between these? Do PC players still generally prefer the Java Edition?

The invisible majority of players uses Bedrock.

The majority of players that stream/post videos or use/write mods use Java.

If you want to play with friends (Macos, Linux etc.) you need Java, because Bedrock is Windows and consoles only.

There is https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest, which can run the Android JARs on MacOS or Linux (by shimming/implementing the Android APIs it uses), but a few months back one of the updates dramatically changed the rendering system, and the lone(?) MacOs/Linux maintainer of mcpelauncher is still catching up. See https://github.com/minecraft-linux/mcpelauncher-manifest/iss...

Until that breakage, I ran it quite successfully on MacOS (although it _did_ have occasional crashes)

Interestingly, it looks like the Bedrock-based "Education Edition" is on MacOS, but normal Bedrock is not.

Yes. So clearly it's not a question of being able to run, or of weird graphics quirks or something. It's a strange omission. Given that Mojang is now owned by Microsoft, it's slightly suspicious…

You can use Geyser [0] to "bridge the gap" to Bedrock clients. There are bugs here and there, but it works pretty great to get everyone on the same server.

[0] https://geysermc.org/