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Did you do a big system upgrade recently and notice you're having gamepad issues? You're not alone. Time to downgrade perhaps.

To be clear this might only be an issue for the more bleeding-edge distributions which update more often, or those of you who are doing some manual updates to their system. The distributions that update more slowly like Ubuntu are likely unaffected right now.

First we have systemd version 243 released around September 3rd, this appears to be causing problems with Steam Input. A Valve developer jumped into the comments there, to note that the update seems to have broken Steam's udev rules to support gamepads—ouch. The systemd developers have been responsive trying to fix it, so hopefully it won't be too long before the issue is solved there.

Another problem is the more recent release of the Linux Kernel 5.3, which appears to have a regression with the DualShock 4 over Bluetooth not working. As of yet, no Kernel developer has commented on that report.

Hat tip to Vash63.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Termy Sep 16, 2019
I've had 5.3 rc7 and 243 for a while (manjaro reverted back to 242 in the meantime), and didn't notice any issues with my xbox 360. At least not in Project Cars 2.
djazz Sep 16, 2019
So that's why controllers in steam stopped working last week. Loading the module 'uinput' fixes it, as that is what Steam uses to create virtual controllers.
tkonicz Sep 16, 2019
I have severe problems with Dualshock4 and the Switch Pro-controller on Debian 10 after updating to Kernel 5.2 via Backports. It could run deeper than just Kernel 5.3 and new systemd
Oet_ Sep 16, 2019
This new systemd messed me up as well. I have to do a sudo modprobe uinput to get the Steam Controller working in-game.

Even after that, some games did not detect my buttons, so I even reinstalled the OS. Now it's working with modprobe.
gustavoyaraujo Sep 16, 2019
Yes, I'm having some issues with my Nintendo Wii U Pro controller. I hope they will fix this soon.
Nibelheim Sep 16, 2019
Yep, 1 week without controller in game but it works on Steam menu.

Thank you for the tip, I didn't found any solution before.
razing32 Sep 16, 2019
Ouch.
Have not played games with a controller recently.
Hope the modprobe is enough to fix it.
hallieballie Sep 16, 2019
I really do not understand why systemd is so great, it is an annoying system to deal with.

When you need to debug form a rescue environment, it is very difficult to see what went wrong, to access logging is science these days.

The time with init scripts was heaven, now we are in hell.
F.Ultra Sep 16, 2019
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Quoting: hallieballieI really do not understand why systemd is so great, it is an annoying system to deal with.

When you need to debug form a rescue environment, it is very difficult to see what went wrong, to access logging is science these days.

The time with init scripts was heaven, now we are in hell.

When you need to debuf from a rescue environment with the old init scripts you would be lucky if you where able to find any form of logs at all. On a systemd system though everything can be found with journalctl, even things that daemons wrote to stderr or stdout are caught.

As a server admin, systemd is the single best thing that have happened to Linux since the kernel.
Avehicle7887 Sep 16, 2019
Seems I'm in luck this time around, my systemd is a bit old (232) and my gamepad is so crappy that it doesn't work with almost none of my games regardless of which kernel I use, I have to use Antimicro to game with it.

On the other hand however, I upgraded to 5.3 this morning and everything went smooth, the nvidia driver also works fine with it. Also worth pointing out that this release contains a fix for system hangs when using Vulkan on Intel HD with Kabylake (7xxx CPUs).


Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 16 September 2019 at 9:41 pm UTC
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