All 4 of my computers and 10 or so laptops ranging from a old think pad to my current daily driver.

OS includ cachy, endeavour, fedora, Ubuntu and Gentoo. Kernels range about as wildly.

PS5 controller is plug and play on all of them steam or not. Iv never experienced crashing on any of them related to plugging a controller in.

Track pad just works, game detection is fine. Steam games work both with and with out steams controller support feature.

It's why I've always used PlayStation controllers. They basically just work wired.

I have some random issues with blue tooth for it on some combinations, where it's impossible to sync it. But wired connection always just works.

I know the "works on my system" cop out sucks. But if your getting crashing it's almost for sure going to be a local problem. Wish I could help more.