💾 Archived View for altesq.net › ~lelkins › posts › void-p2.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:37:12. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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ay mates, lelkins here. it's been a fun gaming journey on void, to be more exact, the glibc version of void. it's my first ever systemd-less distro. it's surprisingly usable for gaming, especially with the fact that they added gamemode in their repository, along with stuff like polymc for you minecraft fellows. i've been on void for, like, a month, i think. just recently came back to arch at around 2022-07-06.
gaming on it can be a little hard if you don't know what you're doing. the general linux gaming stuff like wine and gamemode ARE in the void packages, but they aren't how you expect. the general linux gaming community prefers wine-staging over stable wine, as staging has patches and specific gubbins that make games work better. gamemode is gamemode, but it doesn't work normally to the point of needing to use a different command, as i mentioned in part 1. i will mention how to use gamemode again as it's one of the most important tools of linux gaming. i will use minetest as an example game here.
dbus-launch --exit-with-session gamemoderun minetest
env __GLVND_DISALLOW_PATCHING=1 primusrun minetest
if you want to use both, you do the following: env __GLVND_DISALLOW_PATCHING=1 dbus-launch --exit-with-session gamemoderun primusrun minetest
i found out that time that i can just use my thinkpad in an nvidia-only mode through the bios while flipping through the settings there. it's better performance-wise compared to using bumblebee but i can't record on obs using vaapi, as my gpu doesn't have support for vaapi. it kinda has through libva-vdpau-driver, but only decoding. encoding isn't a thing. the only way i could record through obs is through the cpu, which didn't tank the performance. mpv can use vdpau and works really good. libva-vdpau-driver is good enough for something like firefox for video hardware acceleration, as it only uses vaapi for hw acceleration. but for me, it didn't do much.
most of the games i played actually ran better, especially with my sudden change from an optimus setup to an nvidia-only setup. the reason is the cpu just doing less stuff. on an optimus setup, it also needed to show graphics from the gpu which is already a hard task. bumblebee is known for not having pretty good performance anyway. here comes the list!
if you remember the mega man 8-bit deathmatch installation guide, i like playing that game. i did try to find zandronum on the packages... but as it turns out, it's not in void. at all. so i had to compile it. it was a real journey, i tell ya. zandronum's guide was a little weird to me and you have one dependency that can't be obtained through void's package manager, xbps. it's libjpeg 6.2. we got libjpeg-turbo which isn't compatible. i also tried using the official flatpak build. but it didn't work as intended. at first, i expected the command to work, but it doesn't. i tried to use doomseeker to play a singleplayer session, but that too didn't work as intended. the file browser from the flatpak build doesn't work and straight up freezes.
i tried compiling libjpeg from numerous git repos and none of them worked. all that worked was actually an ubuntu source package, of all things.
just get the zandronum files based on the wiki, like the zandronum source and the fmod files via mercurial. also get the libjpeg 6.2 source package, along with the links to the zandronum and doomseeker guides, from here:
[http] ew ubuntu, i know. but it was the only way.
if you compiled libjpeg 6.2, you can run zandronum's archive but it'll be a little stuttery, so a bit of compiling will be your best bet. basically, compile libjpeg, follow zandronum's guide and compile the game and THEN follow my guide on how to set up zandronum to play mm8bdm.
in part 1, i wanted to know how to edit the sensitivity settings for the trackpoint, the thinkpad's signature symbol placed on the keyboard. my good friend found out a way to do it and made a handy little shell script to make changing the settings easier. i made decent settings for myself, but the trackpoint actually hurt my hand. i played minecraft with it and it was okay. i was able to mine and have a good time in a survival world. tried it on terraria and it kinda worked. most games i threw at it, it kinda worked well and gave me wrist pain after long periods. i had to change a setting to make the trackpoint click when i tap it so i could click a little easier.
it works, that's all i can say. it's obviously not intended for high speed stuff like gaming, but if someone on youtube can actually play counter strike with nothing but a trackpoint and its keyboard, then it IS possible to play games with the red nub.
void surprisingly works for gaming. combined with the speed and the very lean nature of not using systemd. documentation on void is a little wack, though. the more prefered wine-staging isn't present as it's the unstable version, but normal wine works just fine. most games work and some stuff that are on arch, like zandronum, have to be compiled as the void-packages git repository sometimes stays dormant for most cases. a cool thing is that they officially have nvidia-390 drivers on their normal repository, compared to arch where they have the drivers unofficially through the aur.
the reason why i moved back to arch is because i missed how easy it was to get stuff through the aur without the need to manually get stuff myself and tear my hair apart because i don't know where to get libjpeg or something. i also missed the update rush that i got from arch. i do recommend trying out void linux, as it's really nice and might just be the best systemd-less linux distro i ever used.
bye mates!