DualPad

I’ll try Doom though. I saw a couple of Doom 1-inspired games this year. I can try those.

Gyro works great with Doom. I played through Doom Eternal on nightmare difficulty without aim assist. Gyro is the closest to mouse like precision on a controller if you aren't using aim assist.

Lot of life long controller users aren't good at aiming using only joysticks either with increasingly stronger aim assist over the years doing the bulk of the carrying which has led to some players saying a games controls are bad if the aim assist is weaker than ones they do well in.

Then add in how different the dead zone and acceleration curves are for joysticks from game to game and it makes carrying over muscle memory difficult even if you master joystick in one game. It's like how acceleration can throw off mouse users.

But, gyro helps a lot if native gyro is mouse like or you opt to bind mouse to gyro, since the sensitivity is something that can be replicated from game to game like people do with regular mice. This video might be a good starting point. One quirk of gyro is that some games you can just bind mouse to gyro and start playing, but other games may not support simultaneous gamepad + mouse so having to opt for mouse and keyboard binds on the controls. Some people bind joystick to gyro but that introduces unwanted negative acceleration.

I recommend Portal for starting out and getting used to gyro. Then once you are used to aiming with gyro something like Left 4 Dead 2 which has good Steam Input support.

If strong aim assist is present then that can outperform gyro, but that also can outperform a lot of mouse users to the point that even PC lobbies have mouse users abandoning mouse for aim assist supported inputs. So it depends on the level of aim assist. But, with aim assist removed from the equation gyro is better than joysticks and is surprisingly usable against mouse players despite the absence of auto aiming.

Do you encounter the same issue in desktop mode too?

I tried it on my steam deck and was able to apply my custom template to another game in the normal Steam Deck mode so I wonder if maybe the config is corrupted? Maybe make a simple test config template to check out if it applies to other games is worth trying before making your main config from scratch again.

Simplest way I think is saving the controller layout as a template and then you should be available to see in all games when you go to templates.

I do this for the Steam Controller where I saved a general template to use across games so I don't need to reconfigure every single part from scratch.

It is stable.

Steam Input for use with my steam controller and playstation controller for gyro controls. Particularly love the dual touchpads for movement and camera controls and extra click inputs over a single joystick click. I can't deal with default control schemes anymore when it comes to controllers after becoming reliant on the amount of customization Steam Input provides, since it goes beyond a simple remapping with layers, modeshifts, chords, touch menus, action sets, etc.

Linux support that reduces need to fiddle around with settings and mess with lutris type tools and more devs putting in the time to try to be Steam Deck certified. Even when it doesn't run well on the Deck for more demanding titles there is still benefit for more powerful systems and future Steam Deck follow up.

Existence of Steam forums and guides has come in useful for help and has popped up on search results that I wasn't able to find on pcgamingwiki, so reddit isn't the main place I need to rely on. Been a way to also try to reach devs without having to use reddit or twitter.

Steam workshop. I do use nexusmods, moddb, etc. But, sometimes just having it integrated into Steam makes it convenient.

Other launchers are more like comparing a dumbphone versus a smartphone where if all someone wants to do is make calls and text that is fine, but for those that have become accustomed to Steam launcher features beyond launching games there needs to be more done by competitors. Having to use stuff like GLOSSI to try and utilize Steam Input when using third party launchers, or have to fall back to syncthing to try and sync saves from other launchers when using Steam Deck just makes the lack of Linux and custom controller support apparent.

Always be moving/dodging, do glory kills for health, chainsaw for ammo, and most importantly master the Quick Switch technique. This person has a great guide on it. It's basically where you switch weapons after every shot so you don't have to reload and you output damage really fast even on the hardest difficulty.

Given that you are on a controller you can just swap between 3 weapons and still delete enemies. Like here is my play through with my steam controller where I pretty much spammed super shotgun, ballista, and rocket launcher to get through the game on nightmare. There was an update pushed that lets controller uses bind weapons to any button, so set weapons to quick switch with that over relying on the weapon wheel which breaks momentum.