Speaking of Steam and controllers - is anyone else annoyed by piss poor compatibility of PC games with Steam onscreen keyboard. I can count on one hand games with seamless integration, where it popups after moving to input field.
The manual Steam/XBox + "X" shortcut always shows the keyboard, but games like to ignore submitted value. My favorite example is Dark Souls character creation screen, it is the only place in the entire game you can and need to enter text, and it is faster to walk the 50ft and back, than to get it working.
That hasn't been my experience on SteamOS and Bazzite. Generally the keyboard pops and you can enter text, occasionally you do need to do it manually but even then text still works. On my GPD Win Mini I actually have the opposite problem. It brings up the on screen keyboard when I want to use the built in one.
Isn't that a consequence of it being a fairly open platform and no certification gatekeeper before a developer can release/update their game? The platform isn't specifically steam or where mouse/keyboard is unavailable or inconvenient, it's generally what they think most of their target market will be using which is likely a generic windows desktop. I don't think developers or valve themselves would want to set up certification and enforcement to say "you must have X in your game otherwise you can't release on steam", especially for the wide range of categories of criteria you could possibly think of, and someone out there will want a way to do text input on their steering wheel for a driving simulator. PC gaming casts such a wide net it's likely an impossible task.
How do you expect Dark Souls, a game made before the Steam controller, to signal to Steam to open the onscreen keyboard?
Modern games probably have something in the newer steam APIs for controllers, but without that explicit support, there was not a preexisting game API for notifying your host machine that you need an onscreen keyboard.
That can't excuse the onscreen keyboard being nonfunctional though. Steam is already middlemanning control APIs so it should always just work to inject keypresses.
My problem is that in weird cases, the Steam+X shorcut doesn't work for me. I added firefox on my steam deck as a "game" in steam so I could open it without going into desktop mode, and sometimes invoking the onscreen keyboard will bring it up and then immediately close it. I have to quit and restart firefox.
EA still hasn't made its EA account malware SteamDeck compatible. I have to spend 30 minutes every few months to enter again my EA account credentials (nowadays I use a dock and a hardware keyboard).
