The Joys of Being a Linux Nerd


I ran into a frustrating issue recently. I was toying around with my Steam Deck since I just bought a dock for it. I was trying to get a 3rd party controller working so that I could play Streets of Rage 2. It just wasn't working well for me. I disabled Steam input in hopes that maybe that was the issue. Well it wasn't, and for some insane reason, Steam doesn't give the option to turn it back for non-steam games.

I searched through every menu, probably about 10 times and couldn't find anything. Combing through Reddit also turned up nothing, just people bringing up the issue with no solution in site. So I started looking through Steams directories. It seems most of the config files are stored in .vdf. Running find . -type f -name "*streets*" found a Streets of Rage 2 directory. I got a bit excited but the setting wasn't stored the .vdf files located inside of the directory.

I was getting demoralized. How can I find this setting that is somewhere inside of a file in a haystack of probably 100s of .vdf's... I turned to grep. Probably should have started there, but I wanted to practice my find skills. So I cd .local/share/Steam then grep -r --include="*.vdf" 'steaminput'. Nothing showed up. I tried several other things. Finally grep -r --inlclude="*.vdf" 'UseSteam' . and bam! 4 files show up with a beautiful "UseSteamControllerConfig" 0. I quickly vim'd into that sucker and changed that 0 to a 1. Restarted Steam and...It's back to using Steam input!

So if anyone reads this and you lost Steam input and can't get it back. Just look for a file called localconfig.vdf. On my system it was found at: /home/deck/.local/share/Steam/userdata/47163744/config/localconfig.vdf