This is on Bluefin, but thematically it fits well into the gaming-hardware territory, that Bazzite is known for and that is why I post here.
I have a Valve Steam Controller. I can use it without any problems in desktop mode as long as steam is not running. However, when I start steam and use any of the elements of the steam controller, the dialog from GNOME to allow desktop sharing is opened. My regular mouse and keyboard work without any issues.
There are also some other people who experience the same issue:
I suspect that once steam runs, it reconfigures the steam controller with a different control scheme. Gnome intercept my inputs and for unknown reasons it opens the desktop sharing dialog. I really want to tell Gnome that it should not do that but I have no idea how. When I close steam, the issue disappears.
I would appreciate any suggestions how to solve or at least further investigate this issue. Are there any diagnostics programs that I could run?
Flatpak Steam has the libei package which causes issues with Wayland which is why you are getting this error. The major difference between gaming on Bazzite vs. Bluefin/Aurora is the Steam RPM package vs. Flatpak.
Can you elaborate? I wonder if this is something that could be fixed by patching libei.
My working hypothesis was that the steam controller sends a key combination that is caught by Gnome and that key combination happens to be linked to the “open remote desktop dialog” command. But after reading a bit more about libei and this issue it seems that the steam controller sends some input that is supposed to be handled by some remote desktop machinery and that is why I’m seeing the dialog pop up. Is that correct? Are applications in flatpaks considered to be pseudo-“remote applications”, because they do not run directly on the host?
libei is the only way a flatpak is allowed to send inputs to a Wayland desktop. Anything steam does to interact with the desktop or another application via Steam Input would trigger this. Patching it out is not an option because he would be opening yourself up to remote control attacks.
You would have to convince everyone that a whitelist for a single application is an acceptable compromise. What we do in Bazzite is we ship extest which implements the XTest API through Wayland. This solves the problem but is not applicable to the flatpak.