The latest SteamOS update pulls many packages from Debian

Oct 21, 2014 12:59 GMT  ·  By

Valve has issued yet another update for the SteamOS operating system and they have improved the Beta branch of the distribution. There's nothing too impressive, but there are some security fixes that are pretty important.

Valve has two separate branches for SteamOS, one stable and one deemed as Beta. The Beta version is where all the action happens and where all the new features and changes are implemented before getting pushed to the Stable release. Users haven't seen any major modifications to the operating system and it's unlikely that any such changes will be made too soon.

Instead, developers are now trying to make the OS as stable as possible and to get maximum performance out of it. If you install SteamOS right now, you won't be able to use it for anything else but gaming. Sure enough, you can get it to work as a daily operating system, but you can just as well install Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, or any other distro along with Steam.

SteamOS Beta "Alchemist" is not exciting anymore

There was a time when most of the changes implemented in SteamOS were interesting, but that only happened because the system was young and there were many things to improve. That's not the case anymore and that's why many of the newer updates are actually kind of boring and all about new packages from Debian upstream.

"SteamOS is designed to run Steam and Steam games. It also provides a desktop mode which can run regular Linux applications. SteamOS makes use of the standard APT package manager for software updates; you can add third-party sources to your subscribed repositories to gain access to more applications. SteamOS currently provides a limited set of packages, but many Debian wheezy packages work fine on SteamOS. We plan to make a wider variety of packages vailable directly from the SteamOS repositories over time," reads the official website.

Some of the recent changes featured in the SteamOS Beta version include a major update for the OpenSSL package, a new package, p7zip, has been added in the repositories, the plymouth package has been implemented again, and a number of smaller packages have been added in the repositories.

As usual, if you have SteamOS Beta, all you need to do is upgrade and all these changes will be made. If you have the stable version installed, you will have to wait until all these modifications are made available.

You can download the SteamOS Beta Linux distro from Softpedia. This is not a Live CD and it needs to be installed in order to be used.