Hi All,
I thought in case anyone runs into this issue I can help them out. I recently got a steam controller, it wasn't so plug and play to make it work. First you need to install a package from the debian repository
apt install steam-devices
You will need to reboot for the udev rules to work. Now it should work but I found when I started a game the controller stopped working. The controller worked flawlessly in big picture mode and even acted as a keyboard in mouse when in desktop steam. If you run into this problem its because uinput module is not loading into the kernel. So I had to do the following create the following file (as root)
echo 'uinput' > /etc/modules-load.d/uinput.conf
then reboot and everything works fine.