Just hours ago [1]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.

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

[2]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...



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026

[2] https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/commit/1998b650452bdf0bee5209e20e4715b4295abe8c