Controller setting "Allow using as pointer and keyboard" should not be default

I am unsure if this is the proper way to submit feedback… A feedback field directly in KDE might be a good idea. Now to the point

A bit of backstory:
When I first started using linux my PS5 controller touchpad would control the mouse and I had to turn that off because it would interfere with games that listened for touchpad input and would get both PS5 touchpad and mouse input at the same time. I fixed this with an LLM telling me to set a udev rule.

I try to update weekly, I use cachyos. I updated yesterday and today wanted to play a game and had a similar issue to above except the analog sticks would send mouse input , dpad would send arrow keys, start would open the start menu etc. Making the game unplayable!
I spend hours with LLMs and various people on discord trying to find out what was wrong. Eventually someone told me there is a KDE setting. That was the issue.

Honestly I’m quite mad. I would have never guessed KDE of all things was the issue, I’ve had many issues with steam input, bluetooth and permissions in the past causing issues with controllers so that was the only place I was looking.
I don’t see a reason for this to be enabled by default, at the VERY LEAST there should be some indication that this is a setting when connecting the controller since I was using this controller before the update that caused it.

I don’t see any other posts about this being annoying/an issue, so maybe I’m the only one who didn’t instantly check kde settings when their game was acting all wacky.

I would expect a notification upon connecting a controller, or an info screen on updates where things like this are added, or a prompt when connecting a controller asking if I want this setting… just SOMETHING to know it exists.

TLDR: as a windows refugee & linux noob, “Allow using as pointer and keyboard” as a default option to controllers being added out of the blue was an awful experience.

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We agree and just turned it off by default for 6.7.1. It was actually an oversight that it was even on for 6.7.0. Sorry about that.

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I had it disabled and then the update enabled it back, but yeah i shat my pants trying to tinker it too xD

Just ran into this very same issue mucking up my game inputs - I thought it was a steam Proton update issue!

First off: why oh why is the PS5 “start” button now a ‘meta’ key stand-in?

Secondly, the way it’s now been implemented, I imagine the ‘x’ button (or ‘a’ for xbox) is now maybe translated into a mouse button press or something? Instead of the way the PS5’s touchpad was a mouse touchpad and buttons were just buttons.

All of this seems a little backwards, and I don’t like the idea of turning off the setting since a pop-up then comes up saying “well you’ll most likely have screensavers now come in”.

… What was the major push behind the change from 6.6 way where it seemed to work fairly well and didn’t get in the way?

EDIT:

just noticed that the touchpad is showing up as empty - whereas before it had proper device names + paths… Not great guys!