I would recommend the Xbox 360 gamepad, I love it. It's no nice to hold, and apart from most other controllers it has the left stick over the D-pad. So nice! They are plentiful now that Xbox One has come out, so you can probably pick it up at a website like ebay or your national equivalent for pretty cheap.

Quoting: edve98P.s. I am thinking about Logitech F310. Maybe I (and my friends) should just get that one?

Yes, that controller's pretty good as I've used it myself. Not a bad price either. But it doesn't offer vibration. And it stopped working after the wires got exposed. That was probably my fault though.

As far as the X360 controller goes, I would go with the official wired one by Microsoft; I've seen it on sale a few times over at Amazon for a little less than $30 USD. Otherwise, a lot of third-party variants (think of PDP, for example) aren't natively supported in the kernel, which means you'll have to manually set up a custom controller mapping in order for it to work.

But I would just go with the F310 for minimum hassle.

Another vote for the F310, my gamepad and works lovely.

For me taking X360 controller just feels wrong. It's probably because I really hate Microsoft. But but let's stop before this turns into a huge rant.

So I reckon if X360 is out of the question, my best bet is indeed the F310, right?

I've never had problems with PS3/4 controllers. They work so far by just plug and play (mint 17) for me. You can find ps3 controllers for as cheap as under $10. And they feel a bit more traditional than an Xbox controller (to me at least :P )

I might add that the official controllers work much better than third party controllers, I have a generic ps3 controller that works ok, but my official Sony controllers work perfect.

I would always go for the F310 over a playstation controller, as all on-screen prompts give the buttons a F310 or x360 has, and i've not seen any with PS symbols.

Between myself and my two flat mates we actually have one of each of these controllers. I have a steam controller, one has a wired xbox controller, and one has the logitech. They are both new to Linux, so any controller issues they have had were brought to my attention.

They often end up having to switch between xpad and xboxdrv between certain games. The reason being is that xpad detects the 360+logitech triggers as axes. But this seems to confuse the bajesus out of some games, and they decide that the triggers are an analogue stick. This problem can be worked around by using xboxdrv, and setting the triggers as buttons flag. But its still annoying for them. Also xboxdrv likes to crash when you unplug the controller, but that might be a Fedora issue. I hear xboxdrv hasnt been maintained in a while.

Im not sure if the trigger problem is in xpad, or stereotypically poor controller support in some pc games. Maybe its a bit of both.

It seems correct to me that the triggers would be axes, perhaps there is a way i can recalibrate them to report dead center when off, instead of the top left corner the axes marker currently sits at.

Either way the steam controller works great with everything ive tried it on. Sometimes you end up spending 15 minutes tweaking the mapping, but once its done its done.

I see no reason why multiple controllers wouldnt work at the same time. Ive seen xpad assign players 2, 3, and 4 to the 360 light on the controller. I imagine it would more be a question of wether the game itself supports multiple controllers.