I’m using Arch currently and the following issues have been present on every install of Steam I’ve had:
- Controller inputs break constantly. If I use big picture mode, the games will be in some quasi state where it both detects my controller and doesn’t.
- The menus take like 3 seconds to open.
- The right click menu in the system tray does not work 30% of the time.
- Worst of all, when I close a game, steam will not detect that it closes. Once this happens, no other page will load, no menus will open, and i have to
killall steam -s SIGKILL, since no other signal works. It’s also survived SIGKILL multiple times. How? - In game, the shift+tab menu does not work; half the buttons are unresponsive and the game will crash upon closing shift+tab
The arch wiki had nothing on this.
Flatpak and native installs have the same problem, reinstallation does nothing, steam --reset does nothing.
These issues occur across multiple games with different engines.
It’s very strange since I have a very generic system and most people seem to have great experiences.
I have all these problems on occasion on Windows, too. They’re just problems with Big Picture mode.
The first one tho, with the controller wonkiness, is usually caused by leaving Steam Input enabled in a game that 100% natively supports your controller. If the game shows a totally filled in icon (as opposed to no icon or a half filled icon) of your controller, you should disable Steam Input and just let the game handle it. You may also want to disable Steam from translating controller input for the OS itself; sometimes it doesn’t automatically change to just controlling the running game and still messes around like you’re on the desktop.