About

At the end of a long work day, many of us use gaming as a way to cope with the daily struggles and challenges that is life. The Steam Deck, in particular, has proved to be very fruitful as far as evolutionizing our gaming habits. While niche PC gaming handhelds existed prior, the Steam Deck truly sparked an innovation in the handheld PC gaming space – not only having a great price-to-performance ratio and allowing gaming on the go, but helping gamers get away from the headache that is Windows, thanks to Valve’s SteamOS and Proton initiatives.

However, as noble as Valve’s efforts to push Linux gaming forward have been thanks to devices like the Steam Deck, a struggle that some newcomers have when it comes to Linux is not knowing how to do a particular thing that they may already know how to do on Windows – either due to lack of documentation or just being afraid of bringing up a terminal and having to type in a few commands.

I created The Outcaster’s Notebook – the spiritual successor to the now defunct Linux Gaming Central – as a way to help newcomers to Steam Deck/Linux make their transition from Windows more comfortable. Even veterinary Linux users who are terminal gurus can benefit from my guides, as I tend to cover topics that no one else does, such as how to overclock your GameCube controller adapter. Having close to ten years of writing experience – including being a voluntary writer for Boiling Steam – my goal is to make your Steam Deck/Linux experience as easy and pleasurable as possible, and as such, not only do I have guides, but I have polished up my script kitty skills to make things automated. In other words, you should be able to get things like Ship of Harkinian up and running on the Steam Deck with just a few clicks, without having to resort to a terminal.

It is my sincere hope that you will benefit from my guides. Because, after that long work day, no one wants to put in even more work to just get their games to run. And hopefully that means I can bring a smile to your face.

Kind regards,

Mark Dougherty