14 DAY TRIAL // A new Steam for Linux Beta client has been made available by Valve, with more improvements for the In-Home Streaming feature and a number of other fixes.
Valve wants to take its time with the new stable build of the Steam client and it has released yet another version of the Beta branch, with even more fixes and improvements. When the stable release actually arrives, it's going to be huge.
Between stable builds, the developers release a large number of Beta versions, which integrate a lot of new features. Usually, the developers slow down the rate of changes when they get closer to a big release, but they don't seem to be anywhere near a stable version.
According to the changelog, the message displayed to the users when they unblock someone has been corrected, the keyboard accessibility in the block/unblock success dialog has been improved, and the initial startup time when launching Steam (on the Mac OS X platform) has been improved.
Also, a “Virtual Reality mode” has been added to the View menu and the –vr command line option has been removed. From now on, the Virtual Reality mode selection will only show up if SteamVR is installed and if a supported HMD has been detected (like Oculus Rift, for example).
Support for switching from desktop mode to VR, then back to desktop and into Big Picture, has been added, and support has been implemented to permit the application to detect when an HMD has been plugged in after Steam has been started by the user.
One of the most important features added to Steam in the past few months is the In-Home Streaming Beta, which is improved with each release. For example, hardware accelerated encoding has been added via Intel QuickSync, a mouse emulation mode for controllers has been added (it can be toggled with Guide+A), the streaming options UI have been revamped, an option to disable streaming has been added, and a speed vs quality preference setting has been added,
Also, the stats overlay is now off by default and can be enabled in the advanced client options, a 30 Mbit bandwidth option is now available, and a setting to enable traffic QoS priority in the advanced host options has been added.
More details about this latest release can be found in the official announcement. 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.