I’ve recently been playing more games with controller support on Steam and have had some issues getting them to work.

I have a DualShock 4 Controller (for a PS4) and it works fine for some proton games with controller support (Rainworld and BG3 for example) work fine out of the box. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Balatro both work with the default settings but only on Wayland (Hyprland). The games that work only on Wayland display Xbox button glyphs, leading me to believe that they are using Steam Input. I have in the past been able to play games with no controller support using Steam Input to emulate keyboard inputs on x11.

I am now trying to play LEGO Lord of the Rings which has Xbox Controller support but not Playstation Controller support and as such would require Steam Input. I would be happy to get it working on either x11 (i3) or preferably Wayland (Hyprland) but so far the closest I have gotten is being able to select my controller as an input device in the settings (by a button press being detected), this did however not allow me to perform any menu inputs and I was not able to reproduce it after restarting the game.

Overall my experience with my controller has gotten slightly worse over the past years (x11 only, I have barely used it when on Wayland) and I was wondering if anyone in this community had experience with non Xbox/Steam controllers in Steam that they would be willing to share.

A few of side notes:

• The controller works fine for Steam in big picture mode and it is an official Play Station controller from Sony.
• My Steam is installed via flatpak on the device using x11 and the device using Wayland.
• Both devices are setup with EndeavourOS (arch based).
• I run most of my non native games on Proton Experimental.

If I missed some important details that could help resolve my issues or explain why the controller behaves so different on the two devices I’m happy to answer questions :)