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Symptoms:
Some games will not respond to your gaming controller at all when using Wine/Lutris/Heroic.
On Steam you have to turn the controller on before starting a game, or else it will not work.
Cause:
There are many keyboards/mice/tablets from popular brands that are being detected in Linux as a gaming controller. This will cause your real gaming controller to become a secondary "player 2".
Solution:
A workaround is to blacklist the keyboard/mouse/tablet being detected as a controller with udev rules. There are ready made rules "udev-joystick-blacklist" for some known devices on github.
Ramblings:
The worst thing is that this appears to be a very common issue, and it is alarming to see how many support/forum threads there are on the internet about people experiencing these symptoms without ever finding out the reason.
I suspect not even SteamOS has a blacklist for the known devices/vendors that have known problems. I have seen many Reddit posts about controller detection issues with the Steam Deck docked. I bet at least some of those people had a keyboard or mouse connected to the dock that caused the problems.
Last edited by awesam on 26 Sep 2026 at 9:11 pm UTC
Fave Game
DOOM (1993)
I guess you are lucky because some Wacom tablets are known to have this issue too, but maybe they have been patched in the Linux Kernel. A few Linux distros also ship with a pre-installed blacklist like this one: (External Link: You need to be logged in to view this.)
In a perfect world though all of these devices would get a fix in the Linux kernel, so that one does not have to ever manually have to deal with this
Fave Game
DOOM (1993)