I did it. For a few years now I’ve wanted to make the jump but lazyness and a bit of worry that my main game wouldn’t work very well kept me from it.
Then some effing windows update caused ridiculous stuttering on games (or maybe it was a auto-update of some other hidden thing, I couldn’t figure it out) so I decided that if I needed a system wipe, might as well as try gaming on linux.
Honestly? Much easier than I expected. Install Steam, turn two options on and 90% of your library is ready to go. I had to tinker with getting freesync to work (ended up just switching to wayland, which just worked) but other than the plugins I use for my main game requiring a bit of more work, smooth as butter really.
So yeah, if you are a lazy gamer like I am, next time you do a system wipe or get a new computer, try installing linux first. Don’t even bother Dual booting it, if you don’t like it just reinstall (setup your usb drive with ventoy and the images you want to try out.)
Sorry man, I haven’t used a controller for Linux gaming in recent years (outside of things like PPSSPP which worked fine.) If you can find specific error messages in your logs while you’re having trouble with the controller I’d copy/paste those into Google and see if you can find a solution that way, or make a new post in one of the Linux gaming communities and see if anyone has better information than I do.
Edit: this looks promising: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1342veq/steam_flatpak_controller_not_working_couldnt_open/