I’m not sure the status of PS gamepads but for Xbox gamepads it’s a mess. There’s at least 4 different packages which aim to support various Xbox gamepads via differing connection types.
Steam does support any gamepad via Steam Input but this makes Steam a hard dependency, and rules out Lutris, Heroic and other non-Steam methods of launching games. Connecting a gamepad to a KDE-based machine should “just work” similar to Windows.
KDE should make an all-in-one package to support these gamepads, and remove UX blockers like xpadneo requiring bluetoothctl command line usage in order to pair gamepads via Bluetooth.
I would love to be able to get my xbox gamepads to work right on linux. But I really don’t think KDE is the place for it.
For example, one of the reasons I choose xone over the others is because it’s the only one that supports the headphone socket. That means it has an alsa sound card driver, which is a kernel thing. That’s just one example of many, to demonstrate that this is way out of KDE’s territory.
If the gamepad uses standard protocols, then it will work. Gamepad support is literally built into bluetooth and USB. It’s just that MS want control over the gamepad market, so they don’t do that. Nor will they tell anybody exactly what they do do, so it’s up to a handful of enthusiastic individuals to implement as much of it as they have the desire and ability to do… And that’s why we have the situation we do.
