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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.

Fwiw Lemmy is written in Rust

That might just be a mock up. Probably still fair to say that it’s most likely planned at the moment.

Edit: in fact one of the accounts shown on the screenshots never was in a conversation like that.

I have my Masto account set up to auto-delete most of my posts after a while. If Meta connects to the fediverse, I have absolutely zero confidence they will honor those deletion requests.
Not sure how to grapple with that yet, generally speaking I don’t think one of the social media giants embracing ActivityPub necessarily has to be a bad thing.

Google is fairly bad, but a lot of that badness imo stems from them being so ubiquitous and controlling so much of the internet. If Meta, Amazon or TikTok were in that kind of position, I honestly think they would behave even worse.