Agreed! I used it to build the maps for my 13kb Quake demake[1]. Compared to q3radiant that I used back in the day, Trenchbroom is just so much more pleasant to work with. In hindsight it seems totally obvious that _this_ is the way a map editor should work.
func_godot works better than I expected it to the first time I used it, properly imports and compiles triggers, lights, materials, sounds, etc straight from trenchbroom so you really can do 90% of your work in trenchbroom. It's awesome for prototyping!
It's great when you have it set up but there's so a fairly gnarly amount of ritual magic needed to set it up. I kinda wish it was first part integration, especially given the extremely lackluster 3D level editing abilities of Godot itself.
Godot feels very much held back by how much stuff you need to do in 3rd party apps with flakey or nonexistent integration. Software developers often get shit for the learning curve of IDEs, but nothing has the "damn girl, you live like this?" energy as open source gamedev tooling. Even something pretty basic like doing texture painting in Blender? Jesus H. Christ. Makes The GIMP seem more polished than anything Apple put out at the peak of its polished days.
> I grew up using Hammer and this simply blows it out of the water.
Strange to read "I grew up using Hammer." when I still see Hammer as a newfangled update to Worldcraft.
No Quake map editor will let you do anything the Quake engine can't, of course.
If you draw your maps on paper first, as id Software did[0], then the editor you use doesn't matter so much.
J.A.C.K.[1] is the current torchbearer for the Hammer lineage.
Also there is a community fork of Trenchbroom[2] that exists because Trenchbroom includes slop. Or "machine generated code" or "wAIfu generated code" or however salves your feelings.
I can't launch Doom 2016, Brothers or Darksiders 2 on Windows. The screen blanks, if I unplug the HDMI cable and plug it in again I do sometimes get a signal. Ofcourse it works flawless under Linux.
Who would've thought that in 2026 gaming under Linux is actually the better option. Pretty awesome to see it work so well!
My sentiments exactly, and now with the popularity of the steam deck and other Linux handhelds, every sort of new utility related to gaming seems to have first-class Linux support.
About the only issue you could possibly have is anti-cheat and even that has a fair amount of Linux support.
Not in my experience. The 16GB 9070 non-XT seems to have been released in March 2025. I purchased one in November 2025 [0]. I observed -and continue to observe- no significant difference in graphics performance between Linux and Windows. I've also not noticed any significant difference in performance with regards to raytracing, but that might be because I have the non-XT variant, and/or it might be because I run Gentoo Linux, which probably has much newer versions of both Mesa and the kernel than most Linux distributions. I CBA to test either of these theories.
[0] Mad props to Gamers Nexus for publishing the video where they speculated that the time around Thanksgiving was going to be the "low" point for graphics card prices... so if you were thinking of buying an upgrade that was THE time to do so. They were totally correct.
Yes, raytracing works and it’s performant. I don’t know about 90% of Windows 11 performance but I am
too busy enjoying games to care about benchmarks.
Just to put things into perspective, the 9070XT is the third or fourth fastest gaming graphics card money can buy depending on the game.
The 5070Ti is $300 more than the 9070XT with similar performance, the 5080 could give you a good boost but costs even more, then you’ve got the 5090 which is a completely insane and unrealistically expensive purchase.
The 5070ti used to be more closely priced against the 9070XT but the RAM crisis is driving Nvidia card costs up faster than AMD due to the difference in RAM type.
When you think about it in that context I have to ask if it even matters that the raytracing on this card in Linux is competitive when the Nvidia side gives you a lower tier card for the same dollar anyway.
Nvidia typically has more of a performance penalty in Linux than AMD as well, so that narrows the gap further.
This idea that it must have wonderfully perfect raytracing performance has to be put in this perspective. The reality is that even if raytracing is half as fast in Linux as it is in Windows you’re still raytracing much faster than the median gamer on the market. A game that runs poorly on a 9070XT doesn’t exist.
There are also still in 2026 very few games that extensively leverage raytracing and path tracing since the PlayStation and Xbox game consoles are limited in that regard. It makes very little sense for most game developers to make their games only come out looking nice with path tracing cranked up.
So I can't comment on the raytraced experience because I don't bother with the raytracing, however I found AND worked out of the box on day one multiple times now. However RT benchmarks from January show it neck and neck.
Ubuntu LTS distros can need some time, yeah. A few months is not unheard of.
AMD typically starts adding basic kernel support before the hardware comes out, but full feature support is usually shipped shortly after hardware release. I suppose it's to avoid leaking specs before release?
But anyway if you want good support for new hardware, much better to run some sort of rolling release, like most Arch based distros.
Personally I run an Ubuntu LTS but with the latest mesa drivers via ppa, and am always at least a generation behind on the card. Much cheaper that way. Or at least it used to be...
I use it for a bit of everything: dev work (InteliJ), basic 3D modeling/printing (freeCAD, Blender, Orca), light video editing (OBS, Kdenlive), gaming (wine) ...
Could probably go with an Arch based distro, but the Ubuntu/Debian base is useful for the good compatibility.
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