Hi all. I am getting sick of the stick drift on the Xbox and PlayStation controllers, so I’ve started looking into 3rd party controllers with hall effect. Two kept popping up, flydigi and 8bitdo. If anyone owns one of these, how’s their support on Linux? Do they work out of the box? Just plug in the dongle and you’re good to go? Are they stable? I don’t ever use any other buttons than the main ones, so I think won’t need their software. Unless even the main ones needs programming! Do they? Thanks in advance
I’ve got an 8BitDo Pro2. I really like it, but I used to have problems connecting it over Bluetooth (wired would work perfectly fine.)
It just needed a firmware update. You’d probably be fine now (I’ve had my controller for a long time now, and rarely ever gave it an update), but if you experience connection problems with it, I’d try updating the firmware.
After doing that, my controller has worked like a champ ever since.
Man, this is so freaking refreshing to hear. I don’t know why I haven’t bought one of these a long time ago. Buying all the MS and Sony garbage that is made to break. I only ever play wired. Rarely do I use/need the Bluetooth. Do these support the gyro requirements on rpcs3? I was playing uncharted the other day and it was telling me to move the controller on some parts of the game, and the Xbox (more of a shitbox controller) doesn’t work on it
I use 2 8bitdo ultimate 2c wireless on my steam deck. Had to put the 2.4g dongles on short extension cables because of interference from the dock’s USB ports, after that they work flawlessly, both via 2.4g and via bluetooth.
I just ordered this one. This is reassuring. Thank you so much
I have the Flydigi Vader 4 Pro with the USB dongle. And yes, it’s plug and play.
This one is too pricey for me, but I’m definitely keeping an eye on it.
I’ve got an 8BitDo controller and while individual application support varies in quality (had some weirdness with Dolphin not playing nice), Steam consistently recognizes it just fine, literally plug n play. Any standard remappings I would typically do through Steam.
I’d used mine for a few years without issue, but recently had a thing where the controller stopped talking to the dongle. The only way i could use it was if i plugged it in. That required a windows executable to fix unfortunately, but the dongle does work again now. And to your point, I needed windows to remap the paddles on the back, but not the standard buttons.
I dont think its a controller problem Dolphin was always weird to me when it was about controller
Awesome. thank you so much. I’m very basic and only use the default buttons. I play old games on emulators really, that’s all. Nothing fancy. lol
I use a flydigi vader 3. It’s a very good gamepad and works nice out of the box on linux, either wired of wireless using their dongle.
Good to know, as I’m going to keep an eye on the Vader 4
I have a steamdeck, if that counts. My 8bitdo pro2 works perfectly. It registers as an xbox controller, so it’s fine with every game. There’s an upcoming update for steam that will recognize 8bitdo controllers as 8bitdo, too.
It’s a Bluetooth controller, so it’s remote plug and play. Super easy.
The pro2 i have has two backpedals. You can program them to be another button on the controller. I have them as l3 and r3, for example. But i set that up on my windows pc. It saved that setting across platforms. I’ve heard that’s iffy to setup on Linux. But if you don’t care about those pedals then its not a problem. Everything works out of the box.
Edit: actually the controller does show up in the Bluetooth menus in the Linux desktop. So it’s safe to say it works even without steam.
Nice. Thank you so much. I don’t really do any buttons beside the default ones, as my brain can never get used to the extra buttons no matter how much I tried. I just can never use them for some reason. Very basic, so I guess it’ll work for me.
I run Bazzite and I have a few 8bitdo controllers. I’ve only ever used them via bluetooth, but once they are paired they work perfectly.
I do have a Thunderobot G45 I use via dongle. It plugs in and works, no configuration or software needed. And after I set up my system settings properly, I can also use it to wake the system from sleep. But that was a Linux thing, had nothing to do with the controller.
Any of the major distros will probably work with any big-name game controller.
Thank you so much. You have also answered a question I’ve had for the longest time ever. I’ve been dreaming of making a steam console for my bedroom, but didn’t know if it can be woken up by the controller like any regular console. So, thank you.
You’re welcome! Sometimes I wake it up with my wireless keyboard, other times I wake it up with the Thunderobot controller. I haven’t gotten Bluetooth activity to wake it up, but then again I haven’t tried hard.
I had to tweak the configuration so that it would wake up via activity from a USB device. But that’s just part of getting used to managing your system’s configuration, right? :)
Absolutely. This is what Linux is all about, doing it yourself and learning along the way
I’ve had a little weirdness from my 8bitdo “xbox” controller, but I think that might be more due to dual booting and using the controller on both OSes rather than an issue with linux itself.
But once I get it connected, it works perfectly.
I do dualboot, but I just use wired since I don’t really go anywhere whenever I play. :)
