Gnome Display Manager (gdm) and XTEST (lemm.ee)

submitted 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) by lyoko@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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Hi, I've recently discovered that steam client on linux requires the XTEST extension to handle input from controller. However, I can not enable XTEST on gdm no matter what I've done. Switch to lightdm solves it instanly but I prefer gdm.

Could you provide some hint how to debug it and have you experienced that before? Thank you very much!

I am using Arch Linux with Gnome and Wayland.

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[-] gnuhaut@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I have never heard about this, can you link to your source for this? Also what's the symptom here exactly?

AFAIK steam and games directly use the kernel devices for controller input, not any X11 extensions.

Edit: Wait!? Do you want to use the controller as keyboard + mouse? Inside of GDM? Because that might use XTEST after reading about it, since XTEST seems to be some kind of testing protocol that allows one to emulate a mouse.

[-] lyoko@lemm.ee 1 points 36 minutes ago

No steam uses XTEST under the hood for controller. You can see a bug report here. You could try to disable the XTEST extensions and the steam client will crash if you connect with a controller.

For the symptom, If I do a xdpyinfo it will print a list of enabled extensions and no matter what i've tried it does not have the XTEST extension.

this post was submitted on 16 May 2025

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