Comment by musicale

3 days ago

I like big picture mode in Steam, but.... controller support is spotty across Steam games, and personally I think you need both a Steam controller and a DualSense or Xbox controller. Steam also updates itself by default every time you launch, and you have to deal with Windows updates and other irritations. Oh, here's another update for .net, wonderful. And a useless new AI agent. SteamOS and Linux/Proton may be better in some ways, but there are still compatibility and configuration headaches. And half my Steam library doesn't even work on macOS, even games that used to work (not to mention the issues with intel vs. Apple Silicon, etc.)

The "it just works" factor and not having to mess with drivers is a huge advantage of consoles.

Apple TV could almost be a decent game system if Apple ever decided to ship a controller in the box and stopped breaking App Store games every year (though live service games rot on the shelf anyway.)

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musicale

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overfeed  3 days ago

> [...]controller support is spotty[...]

DualSense 4 and 5 support under Linux is rock-solid, wired or wireless. That's to be expected since the drivers are maintained by Sony[1]. I have no idea about the XBox controller, but I know DS works perfectly with Steam/Proton out of the box, with the vanilla Linux kernel.

1. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-HID-PlayStation-PS5

  • musicale  3 days ago

    I have clarified that I meant controller support in the Steam games themselves. Some of them work well, some of them not so well. Others need to be configured. Others only work with a Steam controller. I wish everything worked well with DualSense, especially since I really like its haptics, but it's basically on the many (many) game developers to provide the same kind of controller support that is standard on consoles.

    • overfeed  3 days ago

      Thanks for the clarification. I've into that a couple of times - Steam's button remapping helps sometimes, but you'd have to remember which controller button the on-screen symbol maps to.

    • amlib  3 days ago

      Are you sure you have steam configured right? Because with steam input you can get proper xbox controller emulation on games that don't support PS4/5 and NS controllers. It's not perfect but you should never be stuck if you don't have an xbox or steam controller when running games inside Steam.

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