Gotcha. Now I understand a bit more about the way input is locked down, it looks like I would need OpenSD to allow for more sophisticated controller input without using Steam.

Thanks for the reply, this is really helpful!

If you don’t, the Steam Deck will essentially behave as a Xbox 360 controller.

I see, this makes sense and I guess the “Xbox 360” experience will depend on whether the games themselves have native support for controllers or a very flexible input scheme.

the touchpads will not behave correctly

This is interesting, do you know what would be the difference between using the touchpads on other distros vs through SteamOS? Are they not just seen as a regular mouse input device by both OSs?

Thank you for writing up such a detailed response!

I run Debian on my laptop and tend to install FOSS games through the regular package manager. However, I don’t spend as much time playing these games as I would like, so when I was looking into the Steam Deck I was hoping that it would let me have a very similar setup, but as a portable device.

I see through your reply that, if I want automagic compatibility out of the box, this is crowdsourced and implemented through some intermediate Steam layer. I was hoping there might be some way to bypass Steam and treat the trackpads as regular mouse input, and map the other buttons as if they are keyboard buttons or generic controller inputs, without having to go through Steam.

I guess this would mean the FOSS games I’m interested in playing would need controller support natively implemented, which I’m not too sure on for the games I’m interested in. Probably time to dust off an Xbox 360 controller and see how they perform!