Your replies are in-depth and very helpful feedback, so thanks so much for it! I appreciate you taking the time to write all this out.
I admittedly haven't tested this game enough on Linux, so you probably found more bugs! I shouldn't be happy about that lol but good to know controller input isn't reponsive there. Then again, you're the first to bring up the game having such catastrophic controller issues on Linux...it might be your distribution getting in the way there, possibly. I've had many an issue with certain distros over others with regard to controller input haha.
As for the controller icon labels matching, yeah I never fully fleshed out a system for that, so my controller detection is probably very crude. It involved hard-coding statements for which controller would be plugged in, and I didn't account for other OSs to parse the device names differently. Lesson learned! Your description of the mother dying is so sad by the way, what a horrible way to go :( lol.
Regarding the menu input issue, I did indeed fix it and test it in both Windows and Ubuntu Linux, using both controller and keyboard, so I'm unsure why it's still not working for you, sorry. If you want, you can let me know what Linux distro and controller you're using and I can see if I can replicate it. Any controller that isn't a PS4 or Xbox or iBuffalo controller has not been tested yet, just due to my packed schedule lol.
Yeah I've been meaning to get in touch with the community, but again, packed schedule. Definitely not a bad idea though, thanks for bringing it up! :)