this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
14 points (100.0% liked)

Steam Hardware

21957 readers
278 users here now

A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.

As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title

The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.

If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.

These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.

Rules:

Link to our Matrix Space

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] Subscript5676@piefed.ca 3 points 1 hour ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)