I had some grief installing Red Hat Linux 7.3 but with persistence I was able to get it installed. In terms of compatibility though Valhalla proved to be far superior, so I decided to stick with it and focus on improving other parts of the system instead.
My first choice was to run Red Hat Linux 9, for the arbitrary reason that it was the final release of the once dominant distribution and the second to feature the delightful Bluecurve desktop theme for both Gnome and KDE. I knew then that I was cutting things a bit close, but I still found myself disappointed with the outcome.
Community support for Unreal Tournament was able to breath some new life into the game, even with the limitations of the closed binary. By 2018 however the game was no longer launching for Mesa users. For an engine with such a pedigree on Linux this outcome is still disappointing.