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gaming on void (and a thinkpad)

ay mates, lelkins here. 's been a really long time since y'all heard anything from me since not much is happening in my life. consider this as either a guide or a normal log.

someone i know once made a post about how good void is for older hardware and helped me installing it on my newest laptop: a thinkpad t430. the machine is really good, and void is actually really nice too. it's really light due to the fact that it uses runit instead of systemd. in terms of installation, it's similar to arch. i kept an eye on void ever since i found out about it, but it didn't have gamemode at the time. now gamemode is an official package in the xbps queries so i went like "sure, why not? i can still play some games there."

the thinkpad t430 is a really nice machine. i nicknamed it the dinkypad. i really like this thinkpad. the specs are an intel i7-3632QM as the cpu and an nvidia nvs 5400m as the gpu. as a comparison, the craptop, my old machine, has an intel i3-3110m cpu and an nvidia geforce 820m gpu. here are the issues i had and how i fixed them. a general "issue" i have with some games are a small lag spike but that's due to loading new content on the hard drive. it won't get an ssd since the hdd works just fine.

small issues i had

gamemode doesn't work well if you try to use it normally (like "gamemoderun minetest"). it just hogs your ram, makes your machine go really slow and whir like crazy. i did find a solution to this, which is just doing "dbus-launch --exit-with-session gamemoderun" instead.
primusrun, which is what i use for running stuff through the nvidia gpu via bumblebee, crashes xorg with bbswitch or straight up doesn't work without it. the solution to this is an environment variable. the command needed is "env __GLVND_DISALLOW_PATCHING=1 primusrun".
wine didn't work because my brain is geometric shape during installation. never forget libwine. and also get the 32bit packages

if you wanna run both, have this long string just to run minetest through gamemode and primus: env __GLVND_DISALLOW_PATCHING=1 dbus-launch --exit-with-session gamemoderun primusrun

ok, now that you know the issues, how about ya know performance with the games i usually played on the craptop?

game benchmarks (i think)

minetest ran pretty smoothly, still 60 fps.
veloren runs the same as the craptop, a little better due to the gpu. 111 fps.
starbound (space terraria) works smoothly, with a lot of mods designed for performance since the game isn't very optimized.
terraria works really well, 60 fps all around!
stardew valley works good, there are instances of stutteriness while loading stuff by walking, but that's just the hdd i think. the game is well optimized, barely had to do any settings.
minecraft ran very VERY well, with 80 fps being the main framerate (yes, i play both) using the fabulously optimized modpack. multimc isn't on the void repos, but its nicer counterpart (polymc) is present.
binding of isaac repentance works great. keyboard feels really good, and since the game is keyboard-only, it's a great experience.

i'd genuinely like to use the trackpoint (the little nub in the middle of the keyboard) as a mouse for playing the games i play, but i don't know how to change the sensitivity or any of the trackpoint settings.

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