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.

Weird. I use a ps5 controller on arch, with the zen kernel. The only issue I had is, that the pairing process is somewhat finicky, but nothing that you described.

Unfortunately I don't have the same setup: I use the xboxdrv kernel module to use the PS5 controller for Steam games without native PS5 controller support. I deactivated Steam input for this game (Elite Dangerous, btw.).

I connect (USB) the controller before starting Steam. After connection I immediatly unload the hid_playstation module and start xboxdrv as root (I needed to create a custom mapping for it). Only after that I start Steam and can use the PS5 controller flawlessly in-game.

You might ask, why I am using a PS5 controller instead of an xbox controller. It's all about ergonomics. The PS5 controller is simply better for me.

I've never had such a problem. Been using Linux for years. Ps5 controller is just plug and Play.

Is ps controller support setting checked in steam?

Have you tried mainline just to diagnose whether it's the kernel that's the issue or something else? Fwiw using mainline myself with EndeavourOS which is easyArch, no issues pairing or playing with my dualsense controller out of the box