I've sometimes seen it where while in game and launching the Steam Overlay the controller window won't open... or opened once but failed to open a second time... like it got stuck.

Not sure why, but alt-tab'ing to steam and clicking the controller icon from there allows me to open the controller screen normally.

After alt-tab'ing back to the game, it is "unstuck" and I can open the controller window from within the gameoverlay.

I wonder if this isn't the result of the controller identity mismatch and so the controller being set to desktop mode (AppIds 413080). Do you see the following in your controller log?

~/.local/share/Steam/logs/controller.txt

If so then the issue may be related to the following:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/13251

@Brynvagn ... the fact that you can alt-tab and then be able to open the controller overlay suggests something else may be going wrong, because there is no way for the controller to recover it's identity, though maybe alt-tab has some effect on desktop mode, who knows.