Fix: Borderlands 4 Xbox Controller Input Lag on Steam Fedora Linux

Date: 2025-09-15 | borderlands-4 | explore | fedora | linux | observe | steam | video-games |

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I've been running Fedora Linux as my daily driver for the past several months on my (Lenovo P1 Gen 7). I just booted up Borderlands 4 but was met with severe input lag when I tried to use my Xbox Controller.

Here I'll share how I resolved it on my system.

Update all packages

The first thing I did was update all packages and reboot my system. This seems like a dumb thing to try but it solves a surprising amount of issues and only takes a couple of minutes so worth trying.

One of the benefits of the Fedora distro is that they get many package updates faster than other Linux distros and many contain critical bug fixes. So if you're running into weird issues, it's worth trying to update your machine and see if that fixes it.

To update your packages: sudo dnf update

Once that's done, it's worth doing a reboot to see if things are fixed (plus some updates require rebooting anyway).

This did not solve the issue for me so I kept trying.

Install Xbox Controller Driver

The next thing I tried was installing drivers specifically aimed at improving Xbox Controller support.

For this I followed Fedora's Gaming Controllers docs and installed xpadneo.

dnf copr enable atim/xpadneo
dnf install xpadneo

It's unclear if this solved my issue as I didn't do a full clean room install but this came highly recommended for Xbox controller issues so worth a shot.

Disabling Steam Input

The final thing I tried was disabling Steam Input.

Steam Input is a compatibility layer that helps you customize how the inputs from your machine map to inputs to the game. This is super useful if you want to change configurations or if you use a non-standard controller that lacks key mappings.

Unfortunately it also tends to lead to input lag on some systems, particularly Linux.

To disable this:

  • Go to Borderlands 4 in Library
  • Click Settings > Properties > Controller
  • Set Override for Borderlands 4 to Disable Steam Input

After setting this, restarting Steam, and booting the game back up my input issues were solved.

Next

Caveat that what worked for my machine may not work for your machine. Each machine is a little differnt in how it's setup - its hardware, firmware, and software - so it may take a bit more tweaking to get everything working.

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