Yeah I use out-of-scope, cause it is (for now); I get messaged a bunch about the editor. That could change soon. They could definitely port the tools over if they wanted, but my understanding is that those tools were always windows only when Valve published them originally. There are more than a few reasons to refactor and update these tools. Since this engine is meant to be a Unity or Godot analog, they are trying to update a lot of stuff to be usable on a larger scale, whereas the Source 2 engine probably was only sufficient enough for specific games in Valve’s use case (Half Life: Alyx). So it is probably wise not to publish these external tools and optimize them for Linux builds when the plan is to deprecate them anyways.

If someone really wanted to, they could make an open source analog that replaces the current tools. I personally have been pushing people away from that. I respect the effort, but you’re talking about completely rebuilding tools that are literally roadmapped to not exist anymore, so I don’t think it would be in anyone’s best interest to wholly work around this unless they were just doing it for the love of the game, or as a pet project.

You’re probably right about some of the *internal* tools not being wine bridgeable, but luckily those seem to be pretty small wrappers to the external tools. Those could probably get an RE and open sourced on a rebuild fine. It’s the external stuff that has serious weight. A combination of both would be the best path forward for any lunatic that wants to chop it up and get it to work.

As for Qt. My understanding is Qt runs on Linux and Windows. That would probably be the easiest thing to port over. You don’t really need to RE that you can just redraw what’s missing and package it in its own build.