My Steam controller V2 arrived today and I’ve been playing around with it for a few hours now. First things first: The hardware and built quality seem really great. Mostly what you’d expect from a “shrunk Steam Deck”, but with some clear improvements as well. The d-pad and shoulder buttons feel way nicer than on the Deck. Also, proper haptic/rumble motors.

Using it on Linux (Kubuntu) was initially pretty seamless. Once I connected the puck, I was prompted to do some firmware updates, after which I could start using the controller.

One issue that came up rather quickly was that in some games as well as on the desktop, I could not see the mouse pointer. It was still working but essentially, it was invisible. After some digging, I found that this was a documented issue with Wayland on the old Steam controller. As a workaround, there’s a library called extest, which emulates the old X11 behaviour. After compiling and enabling that, it works. I can even switch between a controller mapping and a desktop mapping, same as on Steam Deck. However, it still seems a little buggy sometimes. For example, I’ve had the on-screen keyboard refuse to come up one time, after which Steam was somehow completely unresponsive until I restarted my PC. Not sure whether issues like these are related to the workaround I had to do or not.

There’s also quite a strange issue with the puck. When I boot up my PC with it plugged in, I can’t control anything on the GNU GRUB. Afterwards, in the OS, it works fine, but it just doesn’t take any keyboard inputs for the GRUB until I plug out the puck and restart the system. Hopefully, this behaviour can be fixed with a firmware update at some point, as it’s fairly annoying.

Edit: Puck issues seem to be connected to the specific USB port. I plugged it into a different one and now GRUB works fine with it plugged in.