Valve Steam Controller
Few years back Valve tried to push into the market of gaming consoles with the idea of producing an operating system based on linux and certify other vendors’ computers to be compatible with this SteamOS. Oh well, some of you might remember that phase. In my opinion it was a great idea that sadly never really took off.
During that time Valve also developed and sold the Steam Controller.
What sets this controller apart from various other controllers its numerous features which at that time were the first of their kind:
- Two touchpads instead of the usual twin sticks (with an additional stick)
- Gyroscopes to track motion
- “Shift paddles” on the bottom
To this day these are my favorite game pads because of these outstanding features and the added possibilities they give you for steering and controlling your game.
Within Steam these controllers are fully supported and work just out of the box, but when you want to use them on a non-steam game you need a few steps to make it work.
In summary, the Steam Controller from Valve can be used on Ubuntu Linux without starting Steam by using the third-party tool SC Controller. This allows users to map the controller’s buttons to keyboard keys, mouse movements, or other functions and use it to play games or control other applications on Ubuntu Linux.
Software Installation
The Steam Controller from Valve can be used on Ubuntu Linux without starting the Steam application by using a third-party tool called SC Controller. Guide to install SC-Controller can be found here:
https://github.com/Ryochan7/sc-controller#building-the-package-by-yourself
While Ryochan7 is not the original author of the project, they updated the project to python3 and keep it functional on newer Linux distro releases since the original author (kozec) seems to not be active in the project at the moment.