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.