LM 18.1 + Xbox 360 wired controller = random minimizing to desktop

[rdlf4]

Hello there, Linux Mint Community

I'm running into something very annoying. I'm trying to use my Xbox 360 wired controller to play Don't Starve. I was using Steam in Big Picture mode and it did display Xbox's button icons, giving me the idea it is working properly. However Don't Starve tells me a different story:
First, it does not recognize the XBox 360 controller. No matter what I do, I don't get to see the button icons, as the game only displays the button labels for what it calls a "generic controller". I get to see button descriptions such as "button 0, button 1, -Y Axis, -X Axis", etc -which is weird, because the first time I plugged my xbox controller to my computer (which runs Linux Mint 18.1 64-bit) it did display an in-game notification pop-up, letting me know a controller has been detected.

As if that wasn't frustrating enough, there is also the fact that, when I use this controller to play the game, it suddenly minimizes and then it takes me back to my desktop. Sometimes, it takes 5 minutes to do that, sometimes it takes up to 7 minutes.. I did pause the game and studied every single service from my system monitor, but nothing caught my eye. I may be missing something though. The thing is, how do I work around this? I don't even know whom I should call for support -- should it be Steam for providing compatible drivers (even though, as I mentioned before, my controller works as expected with Steam) or should I try Klei's support (even though, I already made some digging and found nothing interesting from their forums)?

If you have faced this before and have no idea what to do next, then let me know which gamepad works with this game and doesn't exit out to the desktop every so often.

Regards.