This is old, so maybe things have changed by now. I thought the same thing was happening to me, but as it turns out, Steam was picking up the controller, but not using the PS3 button mapping. So it detected the controller, but I couldn't do anything with it, until I manually mapped the buttons.
The mapping is correct when I use the controller via USB.
Running Fedora 24 here.
Hello @Saroufim, @squarebracket, are you still experiencing this issue with an up to date system?
@kisak-valve I started playing hollow knight maybe 2 months ago? And at that time, I noticed that the problem was still there. Namely, that when connected via bluetooth, buttons weren't mapped correctly. And, to my dismay, the previous method of remapping the buttons in the UI did nothing to solve this.
I just updated to Fedora 28 running kernel 4.16. The buttons now function correctly in both wired and wireless modes, i.e. when I play hollow knight pressing R2 does the right thing. However, it no longer seems to detect the controller as a DS3 in either mode, only as a generic gamepad. This means that games that recognize the DS3 and show controller-specific button prompts, such as hotline miami, now only show the generic buttons. Which, obviously kind of sucks since it means I have to guess at the correct button to press.
Was this the intended behaviour?
Also, is it a correct assumption that what changed was in steam and not in the underlying kernel driver(s)?
I'm still facing this issue. I plugged in an original DualShock3 controller, pressed the PS button and unplugged it, the device is paired, and it works (tested with RetroArch, autodetected and loaded the correct autoconfig profile). Steam won't detect the controller wirelessly nor wired.
Steam detects DualShock3 in modern installations.
@kisak-valve Can be closed. There was no opposing claims.
Nothing extracted yet.
When a dualshock 3 controller is connected via USB, Steam detects it just fine. However, when connected via bluetooth, even though the rest of the system recognizes it, Steam does not detect the controller. This affects all the controller supported games as well.
Tested on openSUSE 13.2.