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⇱ Valve Already Upstreams Support For The New Steam Controller To SDL3 - Phoronix


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Valve Already Upstreams Support For The New Steam Controller To SDL3

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 12 November 2025 at 03:00 PM EST. 19 Comments
Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library.

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) is important to Valve's Steam runtime and used by many games for cross-platform hardware/software abstractions. In ensuring good support ahead of the new Steam Controller's retail availability and seeing that it makes it into the next SDL3 update, today that new Steam Controller support is already upstreamed to SDL Git.

👁 Steam Controller


Prominent SDL developer Sam Lantinga at Valve was the one to author and upstream support for the new Steam Controller to SDL.

👁 Steam Controller SDL commit


This commit landed the support for the new Steam Controller. The commit confirms the device's codename as Triton. The commit also adds dongles as Proteus and Nereid.

Now on the lookout for any upcoming Linux kernel changes for supporting the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, or Steam Controller devices...

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.