Had a few Xbox controllers over the years to use for PC gaming and used to think rumble was a cool feature for them, but lately got the Xbox Series S / X controller to play games on Steam with. And most of the functions and features of the controller are great, but the controller often seems to rumble at inappropriate times like it has a mind of its own or something. It's getting to be pretty annoying, honestly.

It's at a point now where instead of enhancing immersion in games it actually hurts immersion because it rumbles at such random and inappropriate times.

Yeah yeah yeah "update the firmware" I expect you'll say. Dude, the controller should just work when it arrives like all my other Xbox controllers always did. I shouldn't have to connect it to some app I don't want on a spyware OS I don't want to use (Windows) to use this thing.

Had none of these problems with Xbox 360 controllers. Why are Xbox controllers seemingly getting worse as they get newer?

Anyway I DID end up connecting it to some Windows laptop once several months ago to give it some updates when it was having some other issue. And now I have this problem...