Yet they f***ed up again, there’s no bushing around it. Despite the fact that the Steam Linux client beta from a couple weeks ago effectively rendered your Steam Controller useless and the bug was reported, they apparently went ahead and pushed it to the stable client branch - this morning I had the unpleasant surprise of holding a brick in my hands instead of a working Steam Controller.

I used the answer provided on the Ubuntu forum to fix the situation.

Just open a terminal and edit the following file with your editor of choice:

sudo nano /lib/udev/rules.d/99-steam-controller-perms.rules

and replace everything inside there by (note that you have to change the GROUP value on the 4th line, to that of your user name):

# This rule is needed for basic functionality of the controller in Steam and keyboard/mouse emulation
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", MODE="0666"

# This rule is necessary for gamepad emulation; make sure you replace 'pgriffais' with a group that the user that runs Steam belongs to
KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", GROUP="yourusername", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"

# Valve HID devices over USB hidraw
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", MODE="0666"

# Valve HID devices over bluetooth hidraw
KERNEL=="hidraw*", KERNELS=="*28DE:*", MODE="0666"

# DualShock 4 over USB hidraw
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="05c4", MODE="0666"

# DualShock 4 wireless adapter over USB hidraw
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0ba0", MODE="0666"

# DualShock 4 Slim over USB hidraw
KERNEL=="hidraw*", ATTRS{idVendor}=="054c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="09cc", MODE="0666"

# DualShock 4 over bluetooth hidraw
KERNEL=="hidraw*", KERNELS=="*054C:05C4*", MODE="0666"

# DualShock 4 Slim over bluetooth hidraw
KERNEL=="hidraw*", KERNELS=="*054C:09CC*", MODE="0666"

One you are done editing in nano, you can hit CTRL+x, and SHIFT+y to confirm the changes. Reboot your machine, and now your Steam Controller should be working again.

Valve, seriously, you are only supporting officially 2 distros (SteamOS and Ubuntu), at least do it right…