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I’m not even sure Taiwan makes that claim, but if they do then I’m fine with that.

They do. The official government line currently is that they have no need to formally declare independence (which might trigger a Chinese invasion) because they already are an independent country by most meaningful measures (which is true of course)

I had heard they view themselves as the legitimate government of a (unified) China.

That used to be the official position decades ago. But apart from a few old nationalistic farts maybe, nobody on Taiwan really holds that position anymore.

It will stop a lot of people from entering random commands they googled up though.

How does installing packages or configuring software work, if system files can’t be changed?

On reboot. You install your changes into a separate part of the filesystem that’s not running and then “switch parts” on next boot. Different distros do this differently. Vanilla OS has an AB system which basically works like Android does it, openSUSE uses btrfs snapshots and Fedora also uses btrfs I think but they got a more complex layering system on top.

I get that there’s a security benefit just in that malware can’t change system files – but that is achieved by proper permission management on traditional systems too.

Is it though? All it takes is a misconfiguration or exploit to bypass it, so having several layers of protection isn’t a bad thing and how any reasonably secure system works. And having parts of your system predetermined as read only is a comparably tough nut to crack.

I think Karl actually gets a lot of love on Lemmy, ifyaknowwhatimean. 🟥🛠️

You could check out kbin.social and see if the customization options can be made to your liking. You can definitely turn off thumbnails on a user level for example and make it look quite old-reddity in general.
Would need a new account of course, but thanks to federation you can still follow and participate in the same communities.

Reddit hugely benefits from centralization. It’s hard to vibrant communities for niche topics when these communities are even further split up through some means.
This is a challenge lemmy/kbin etc have to face that will make mass adoption even more difficult than for mastodon etc where the focal point are people and not groups anyways.

I think making an effort to have topic specific instances and not generalistic instances that often duplicate topics is possibly one of the best way to mitigate this inbuilt advantage lemmy/kbin etc face.

Other hugely important things would be integration with groups from mastodon, pixelfed etc once those come along and the ability to merge and move entire communities imo.