steam-devices

List of devices Steam and SteamVR will want read/write permissions on, to help downstream distributions create udev rules/etc

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List of devices Steam and SteamVR will want read/write permissions on, to help downstream distributions create udev rules/etc

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Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

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Observed mentions: 2022-09-19 03:12:01 UTC to 2026-04-02 06:28:12 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

ThatPlayer·Apr 2, 2026

I believe most of those work with controller drivers in the application (Dolphin Emulator or Steam/SDL) rather than the OS level. That's why the Windows solution requires Zadig to replace the HID driver. On Linux instead of replacing the driver, you have to add an udev rule that allows applications to communicate with the USB device directly: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices/blob/master/6... And you can see in this list, it's not the only controller with that requirement. SteamOS includes this by default.

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cesarb·Sep 19, 2022

> The effort you need to go through to actually use these depends on how your distribution handles the file permissions of /dev/uinput. Some of them have it as root:input, in which case you just need to usermod -a -G input <yourusername> and then relog to get it working. Others have it as root:root so you either need to go do some reconfigurations to change its permissions or live with running the software using it as root. There's a trick to that. The TL;DR is "install the steam-devices package or similar" (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-devices/), which adds the following udev rule (and others, but this is the relevant one): # Steam Controller udev write access KERNEL=="uinput", SUBSYSTEM=="misc", TAG+="uaccess", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput" This does some udev magic to add an ACL to /dev/uinput allowing the currently logg

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ed in user to write to it. Its effect will be something like: $ getfacl /dev/uinput getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names # file: dev/uinput # owner: root # group: root user::rw- user:cesarb:rw- group::--- mask::rw- other::--- The reason Steam has that udev rule is for something really cool called Steam Link, which allows you to use your Android phone, through your local network, as if it were a joystick for your computer. For some games (and its own user interface, which switches to a simplified "big picture" mode when you connect that emulated joystick) it does it directly without going through /dev/uinput, but for other games (which read the joystick input directly, without going through the Steam libraries) it sends the emulated input through /dev/uinput.

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