I’m a tinkerer as well, but I’m at a point in my life where I need to prioritize my tinkering haha. Like buying stir-fry takeout (Windows/MacOS), cooking it by buying a pre-packaged bag (packaged mainstream Linux distro), or starting from scratch, experimenting with literally everything from chopping technique to cooking temp for each ingredient, until you realize you’re missing an ingredient you need, then you have to go back to the store (Arch lol).

Late to the party, but Mass Effect, Dead Space, and the Arkham trilogy are all extremely solid choices haha.

Is there a distro you recommend? I’ve toyed around with Tails, but the lack of persistence and forcing all traffic through Tor instead of a VPN (I guess the whole point of Tails) is too inconvenient for daily use.

In the Star Trek universe, if you’re intent on “glassing” a planet, it’s in one of two scenarios:

1. The planet inhabitants can’t fight off a single star ship, in which case you could just park in orbit and bombard to your heart’s content, with the option of either precision strikes or complete annihilation, without expending anything other than the energy it takes to power the ship.
2. The inhabitants can fight off a star ship, in which case they likely have the technology to detect such a weapon at sufficient range to intercept/destroy/redirect it, or planetary shielding powerful enough to stop it.

In the latter case, you could put the effort into adding a cloaking device to the weapon to get around that. But in that case, why not just use a regular cloaked ship to delivery some other payload? There are tons of examples in TNG of narrowly-averted planet-killing disasters only prevented by careful engineering. Probably way easier to actually cause the disaster. Examples include igniting the atmosphere, causing geographic instability/earthquakes/volcanic reactions, exploding the system’s star, crashing a natural moon into the planet, unleashing a biological weapon…