Your story reminds me of diving a French car for the first time. No knob or lever can be found in the usual spaces and in the end you always end up giving a turn signal when you try to use the windscreen wiper.

I am using the German QWERTZ most of the time and found the layout rather reasonable. I once tried to learn the neo layout which had the most used letters on the middle row, but you really only can use that at home so I stopped after a week or two as it did not really seemed worth the effort.

I saw your conversation on the simracing-channel and there seems to be some progress. I just realized from my notes that my handbrake does not cause any issues under linux even if it looks the same as yours. (They must have implemented the software differently on mine). I had to make some adjustments for the pedals and H-shifter but not the handbrake and just misremembered, sorry. Protopedal is what I used to get around the bug in proton, though. I think proton does not recognize a usb device as controller, if it does not have a certain number of buttons and/or axes.

I am glad to hear you got it to work! I think I took notes on how I got it to work. But I remember having also added a similar rule as you did at some point. I may be able to find my notes tomorrow.

I am pretty sure you need to configure more (fake) buttons for the handbrake, I had the same problem. Otherwise it does not get recognized as a gaming device.

I can look up later how I solved this or you can ask the simracing linux community, which helped me with a couple of similar pronlems before:

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