vracker

I went with Fedora for my gaming desktop and I think the only controllers supported out of the box were direct input controllers. Personally I have a Xbox series x controller and wireless dongle. By default the dongle is used as a wifi adapter which kind of took me by surprise.

To get the controller working, I had to install the Xone kernal module from git. After that everything worked fine. Steam, Lutris and yuzu. Once you get a controller working on the system it pretty much works for any app that uses controller input.

Distributions can have a big impact on the effort and knowledge you need to get things working. For example Nobara flat out asks if you want to install xbox controller support.