14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has released yet another Beta version of the Steam client and brought a few needed fixes and various improvements.
A new Steam Beta client has been made available by Valve and it looks like the developers have been really busy with the Steam Summer Sale. Almost two weeks have passed since the previous Steam update, Beta or Stable, but now the devs are working to get everything up to speed.
It's very likely that a new stable version will be launched soon, if we take in consideration the latest development releases, but it will probably surface after the Steam Summer Sale ends, on June 30.
According to the changelog, a memory issue and a crash that occurred when voice APIs were sent corrupt data have been fixed, and the bug that was responsible for the error "The streaming client exited unexpectedly" has been corrected. This latest problem was happening with In-Home Streaming, in some cases where D3D9 and OpenGL weren't available.
Also, a bug in the in-game overlay that could lead to a game crash in ShellExecute calls with unexpected parameters has been fixed, the in-game overlay has been changed and it now prefers the first created and still in-use swapchain, streaming controller support has been added for games using the Unity engine, and a black screen that occurred with some launchers when using the Windows 7 Basic themes has been fixed.
Keep in mind that this is a Beta version and bugs are bound to show up. In order to get it, you have to enroll in the Beta program, from Preferences, and to restart the application.
If you already are in the Beta program, you won't have to do anything special. After you start the application, you will be prompted to update it. It will take a while, so be patient.
If you don’t have the client installed, you can download the Steam for Linux installer from Softpedia. This is not the actual application, but a small tool provided by Valve.
Don't move to the Beta branch of Steam unless you really know what you are doing. It's possible to mess with the Steam installation and lose all the installed applications. The application runs just fine most of the time, but it's possible to encounter bugs and problems that can render Steam unusable until the next update.