what are your experiences using game controllers with linux, I’m especially interested in the xbox series s controller because it’s the one I have, but I’m also interested in other controllers. From my experience the latency is disappointing, but I have no way of proving it.
So, I primarily use this controller in bluetooth mode using xpadneo. There’s definitely noticeable latency, but in most games it’s fine, I played through a lot of games without bother… until I played Conker: Live and Reloaded. On the infamous race level, it took me like two days to pass it, and I only made some progress when i connected the cable and dropped BT. Even that was fine though, It was just one old game and just one level, there could be a number of things to blame for that. Come hollow knight, as the game got harder after beating Hornet, it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t get far without the cable, save for traversing the world, still, not that bad… until I got to fight radiance. It has been extremely frustrating, I tried it for days and eventually I started just doing a few attempts every few days, without any improvement, finding it hard to get to the second phase. Today I visited my parents and in the late evening decided to try it on a windows computer I left here, mind you, the last time I played was more than a week ago. So, I start the game, plug the same controller in, with the same cable, I beat Radiance on the fucking first try, with half health bar left…
It literally happened 10 minutes ago, I’m still riled up, this doesn’t make sense, this has to be latency, there is no way I got that better just like that, It is literally impossible.
So, after all that, I need to unfuck the latency of my controller someway… Ok, it’s fine on most games, but this situation is… frustrating


I am seeing higher latency even plugged via cable though, even if less so
You shouldn’t feel any lag at all, even on Bluetooth if its working properly. Maybe there are other things going on that adds to the overall lag. You should test another controller that is not using the xpadneo driver.
I quickly searched the web: https://superuser.com/questions/1653283/how-to-resolve-the-input-lag-when-using-xbox-series-xs-with-bluetooth-on-linux and the person solved the issue by updating controller firmware, the Linux Kernel and the xpadneo driver itself. But its an old post, so maybe not what you need to do. I don’t know what distribution and version you have and if you can update at all.
My system should be fully updated, I will try an Xbox 360 cabled controller