The Duke still "reboots" itself without constant chatter with the system. This is a "known issue" in the xpad driver, but unfortunately the patch has not been issued nor upstreamed.
This is a really, REALLY stupid way of making it so my big chonker of a gamepad doesn't require me to open a terminal and force some IDs into the xpad driver.
Yeah. The Duke won't "restart" itself whenever Steam is active, meaning VALVe's "Steam gamepad daemon" (my interpretation) has to be sending a keepalive packet through the xpad driver, keeping the Duke awake and stopping it from being a stupid reinitializing circuitboard.
Never said I wasn't, mate.