u/kittenzrulz123

Right as prices for the steam deck oled skyrocket

Of course, because that's tech in 2026. Pay more and expect shortages.

Atp I would be shocked if the steam frame launched at anything less than $1k, hell it might end up costing $1.5k. The steam machine is probably gonna cost around $1k

The steam frame is coming in the summer, probrally at a significantly higher price than originally planned

I deeply appreciate the work you do, hopefully the clients and frontends will soon support these features

It was abandoned essentially for quite a bit of time, I believe it has been removed from the debian repos as well. Recently KDE revamped the UI and revived the project around Wayland and modern Plasma.

What other API are they supposed to support that has wide support and supports all features while not being tied to a specific ecosystem? Because as I said if they made a standalone steaminput driver that would require explicit support from developers (outside steam nobody else really interprets controller input the same way, typically they just allow the devs to do whatever). Its more complex than games just automatically accept any controller with any input method, they either need a stable API to call upon (which outside of steam is basically just xinput) or have a translation layer. Lets be honest nobody is going out of their way to support a standalone steaminput except maybe gog.

If it was xinput you would be correct it would not require any additional dev work as they already support xinput, however functionality would be so severely reduced that honestly I cannot think of a single reason to use it like that (unless you really like the ergonomics I guess). If they went out of their way to make a standalone steaminput driver though that would require additional dev work for game devs that nobody else would do. You say why make excuses for rich corporations but why are you making excuses for xbox basically limiting xinput to their own controllers. Objectively xinput sucks, its clear that they never intended it to be a universal standard and until a truly open source API can replace it then yeah you're going to have weird solutions like requiring steam open.

Not even remotely related, also if they made a standalone driver it wouldnt matter because for the most part xinput doesnt support the unique hardware and if they made a standalone steaminput driver nobody else would put in any effort to support it. Its like how Valve lets anyone publish software for SteamOS by supporting flatpaks yet not a single other store acturally does. They would need to emulate xinput or directly support it meaning the touchpads and back buttons wouldnt be supported along with gyro or touchsense (at that point just get a standard controller).

Why would it support xinput? If it did then touchpads wouldnt work in that mode, gyro, gripsense, macros, and the back buttons. Also not a single valve product has ever supported xinput not the original steam controller or the steam deck, why would this suddenly be a massive departure?

The price is painful but theres nothing else like it, im gonna buy it when it launches

Due to the placement its not even remotely comparable, their trackpad is useless for precise aiming or really anything since its that out of the way. At this point it only exists for the few ps4 games that used it.

SteamVR supports Linux natively, VR headsets on the other hand is a case by case situation (if the headset doesn't support Linux SteamVR can't magically make it work)