14 DAY TRIAL // Valve's SteamOS has been updated once more and the developers have upgraded many of the default packages. More importantly, they have also added a new font called Liberation, which was requested by the community.
The number of SteamOS updates has decreased dramatically, and it looks like Valve is pretty content with the product they have. It's still using the previous Debian 7.x branch, and they have expressed no interest in upgrading to Debian 8 "Jessie." With very few exceptions, the only stuff that still gets upgraded from one version to another are the core packages, the Linux kernel, and the drivers.
It's been more than a month since the latest SteamOS update, but there's nothing too spectacular. In fact, the Linux kernel, and the drivers have remained pretty much intact. On the other hand, the new Liberation font will be very appreciated by the users who were already getting it without Valve's help.
SteamOS 161 is a minor update
"SteamOS is a fork (derivative) of Debian[www.debian.org] GNU/Linux. The first version (SteamOS 1.0) is called 'alchemist' and it is based on the Debian 'wheezy' (stable 7.1) distribution. All of the base operating system components are open source. The Steam client itself is proprietary, as are some proprietary third party drivers. All SteamOS machines are set to auto-update their OS from Valve's public repositories on a regular basis through the standard Debian APT package manager," reads the official website.
The only problem is that you can't alternate at will between the stable and Beta channels. Once you get the Beta version, you won't be able to just switch to the stable version. You will need to reinstall it all over again.
According to the changelog, the latest tzdata has been implemented, a new Iceweasel version has been implemented, ntfs-3g has been upgraded as well, and the OpenSSL package has been updated to fix all the recently discovered issues.
You can download the latest SteamOS release from Softpedia.