The Steam Controllers have started to ship to gamers across the world, and some people are already using them to play games. Unfortunately, the Steam Controllers don’t work by default with Ubuntu, but there is a workaround in place.

The fact that Steam Controllers don’t work in Ubuntu is not new information. In fact, a couple of bugs on Launchpad were opened a while back, and it looks like the Ubuntu devs didn’t take care of them. It’s not clear why they didn’t fix the issue, but the fact of the matter is that they don’t work with Ubuntu OSes. A workaround is available; it’s not ideal, but it should only be a temporary solution.

A question and an answer were posted on askubuntu.com to prevent the eventual problems that the community would encounter. As I said before, it’s not the easiest or most elegant solution, but at least it’s possible, and it won’t create too many issues, with the exception of the fact that you might need to download a lot more packages than you would want.

Here’s what you need to do

Developer Jorge Castro wrote this on askubuntu.com, “This is a workaround answer, the controller will be supported in an update to the Steam package, which is in progress.”

Users will need to create a udev file:

sudoedit /lib/udev/rules.d/99-steam-controller-perms.rules

The file needs to have this content:

#USB devices
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", MODE="0666"
# Oculus HID Sensor naming and permissioning
KERNEL=="hidraw*", SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2833", MODE="0666"

sudo chmod 666 /dev/uinput

Unfortunately, this command doesn’t survive reboot. For a more permanent solution, you will need to add the python3-autopilot package, which has a few dependencies.

sudo apt-get install python3-autopilot

This is pretty much it, just reboot and you will be able to use the Steam Controller. It’s not clear how long it will take for the Ubuntu bugs to be corrected or until the Steam package gets that upgrade, so this will be the only way of using the controller. It would also be interesting to see how other distros will interact with the new Steam Controller.