Important edit: The Steam Controller is not totally out of stock. They are toggling availability to limit orders. If you have not yet gotten one, continue checking the site.
Who all managed to get one?
Who’s with me in the “impatiently has to wait for them to return to stock” camp?
What excites you most about the Steam Controller?
Are you alright with Steam running in the background? As far as I know, that’s all that’s really needed to get the full functionality outside of Steam for most uses. It’ll just be using whatever you have set up as your desktop profile. For other things, programs like SISR already exist too.
You have to actually launch the game through steam for it to work as a controller. It’s actually worse than the OG controller since I’m pretty sure the left stick and face buttons still acted as normal xinput devices.
On the Steam Deck you can switch to a pure gamepad mode by holding down the start button. They first implemented that with Steam running and later added it to the Linux driver so that it works even when Steam isn’t running.
I would be very surprised if they don’t do the same with the Steam Controller.
It does put it into gamepad mode, but that doesn’t make it act as a normal xinput device.
I found a (kinda funky) program called SISR which forces steam to think it’s always in a game and make it act like a normal joystick. It kinda breaks windows a bit, but at least it works and a reboot fixes windows.