14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has just released a huge Beta update for its Steam client, featuring enhancements and fixes for almost all aspects of the software.
Between stable builds, the developers launch a large number of Beta versions, which integrate a lot of new features. In the case of this particular update, the developers didn't pull any punches and managed to get a huge amount of new stuff shortly after a new stable client was made available.
Intermediary updates are not usually this big and Valve takes its time to get small changes that it can properly test between releases. That will be hard to do with such a huge array of improvements if something goes wrong. As you can clearly see, there is nothing specific for Linux, but many of the changes apply to all platforms.
According to the changelog, several small memory leaks in the Steam client have been fixed, a rare crash that occurred during a workshop image update inside the library's Details view has been fixed, the DLCs can now be disabled in the DLC properties page for that game, a new profile section has been added to the main menu replacing the old community section (the Big Picture look and feel should be more up to date now), the movie playback support and support for animated gifs has been improved, and adding non-Steam games is now directly supported in Big Picture.
Also, the non-Steam games are now able to show the icon art when it's available, a bug where focus could have ended up in an unexpected place has been fixed, the In-Home Streaming feature is now available to everyone running the client Beta, an intro dialog has been added for the first time the user starts streaming a game, the crawling speed has been improved, the Music features are now available while the client is offline, and the latency when streaming at the client refresh rate has been reduced.
Probably the most interesting feature in this release is the fact that all users can now use the Steaming feature, not only the ones who were invited.
More details about this latest release and the bugs that have been fixed can be found in the official announcement. You can download the Steam for Linux installer from Softpedia.
Keep in mind that this is a Beta version and you might experience some problems with it. In order to get it, you have to enroll in the Beta program, from Preferences.