luckily the steam controller is very configurable. All the buttons can be remapped, with layers, for basically anything you could imagine. I have an OG steam controller that I use to play helldivers 2. The OG steam controller does not have a D pad at all, and D pad input is very important in that game. Normally you hold LB and then use the D pad to input stuff. So for the steam controller, I added a layer where when holding LB (and only when holding LB) the ABXY buttons become a D pad. So it’s ABXY or a D pad depending on the context and proper layers mean I don’t even have to think about it. I’m sure if the D pad on this one isn’t clicky enough, you could do something like that.

The standard layout “just works” 99% of the time, the exact same as a console controller layout. All the fancy stuff is there if you want it, but very rarely required.

Honestly the popular linux distros are pretty polished / user friendly these days. You’ll run into little issues, and you need to be at least a little bit curious / tech savvy to figure them out, but it’s nothing a little googling can’t solve typically.