I know this was talked about a while ago, that the Steam controller wouldn’t work like a “regular controller” without Steam. So I’m curious what drivers are there if not xinput or dinput, both of which require MS licenses from what I’ve heard (please cmiiw), in which case it makes sense for Valve to not want to include that in their controller.
I guess this is more so a question for regular Linux junkies: what other drivers are available for Valve to adopt that would allow it to work not just on Linux but also macOS and Windows? Not that I use any of these systems, but just speaking from statistics, cause most buyers are going to be from Windows I reckon.
For Linux, does the Joystick API even support the back paddles? Gyro is likely unsupported from a quick search.
Valve could open source the Steam Controller driver (including the Steam Input configuration and full set of functionality) and make it installable to use without Steam. And for Linux users, at least the core driver could be integrated into Linux for out of the box usability. This would be my perfect scenario. No need to emulate a different type of device, it is its own. A man can only dream.
Steam Input being independent from Steam would be pretty cool. Upstreaming it to the kernel is nice, but the kernel can be slow-moving, and it doesn’t necessarily lend well to cases where you want to be able to deliver fixes to consumers outside of Linux’s release cadence. Now, Valve could perhaps go release with 2 separate cadences, the older driver as a fallback, and offer a DKMS build for newer driver releases, but it IS work to make sure it doesn’t bork someone’s system.
That is basically the current state of the Steam Deck’s controller driver.
You probably could already find the new controller’s driver in Valve’s repositories and compile it for your kernel. Maybe Bazzite and Co have it already integrated. No idea. But if that isn’t the case it’s just a matter of time.
According to Russ from Retro Game Corps (YouTube), in Windos, without Steam running, the new Steam Controller acts like a keyboard (mapping the d-pad to WASD, etc).
He also said that Rocknix (a Linux distro for Rockchip-based handhelds) already recognizes the Steam Controller, suggesting that other Linux distros could pretty easily include drivers as well, if they haven’t already.
First time hearing about Rocknix. Not heard about Rockchip too. Seems like a cool project though. Wondering where they got the driver from, or if they made their own.
Wondering where they got the driver from, or if they made their own.
Probably from https://github.com/evlaV or directly from Valve’s packages.
When you check KDE’s gamepad page without Steam running it appears like any other controller. Back buttons are just additional buttons.
It’s a shame that the capacitive joysticks aren’t buttons as well. And I’d expect the gyros to just appear alongside the other axis as pure numbers but unfortunately they do not. Same with the touchpads.
Are we talking about the old controller? Or the new one? Cause I’m sitting here wondering… how are you able to see that, unless you somehow already have the new controllers?
Or are you using the Steam Deck’s controller to check that?
Sorry for the volley of questions here, but I’m just super curious somehow.
Not the person you asked, but I do have the new controller, and it works as they described it.
How it works afaik is that SDL has a driver for it, even if the kernel doesn’t have a generic one yet. The controller also works in emulators without Steam running because of that.
libsdl seems like a good base. Seems like it’s available in Debian and in the main Arch repo too. That’s plenty good for Linux. Looks like it’s also available for Windows too.
Then what was the fuss from YT reviewers about?
Good thing about Linux is that anyone can contribute to make what you describe actually happen.
I actually tried to do that but I didn’t find where the buttons and axis are defined.
