A new Steam Beta client is available for download

Mar 5, 2014 09:01 GMT  ·  By

Valve has just released a new Beta version for its Steam for Linux client, featuring a lot of fixes and changes for all the different aspects of the application.

When a development version garners sufficient changes, Valve promotes it to stable and the work for the next beta starts almost immediately. The new Beta branch is rather new and the developers are pushing a lot of changes and improvements.

One of the most important problems that have been tackled in the update is an issue that was causing games to still show in the user's library even if they had been uninstalled. Related to this issue, another fix has been pushed and apps should now detect content updates properly.

According to the changelog, a performance regression that occurred when Steam Big Picture took all available CPU resources once it was minimized has been fixed, and a game crash that happened when more than ten processes were attached to the Steam overlay has been corrected, which also fixes "CID The Dummy" on Linux.

The In-Home Streaming Beta feature hasn't been forgotten, and now remote game controller support for Dishonored is available, responsiveness and smoothness have been improved by decoupling game framerate and capture rate, a framerate improvement for older dual-core laptops has been implemented (although it's only experimental), audio crackling on SteamOS has been corrected, and remote gamepad support has been added when streaming games from Linux.

Music Beta also got a lot of attention from the developers, and the client is now able to display huge music libraries, the handling of large or broken cover art has been improved, album cover handling (when no cover has been provided), users can select Artists with the controller, in the Artist Library, and the Volume is now clickable with the mouse and should no longer disappear after the restart.

Other changes include better help at login if the user has forgotten the credentials, support for setting up the voice input device in Big Picture mode, a couple of Virtual Reality Mode fixes, and a few other minor improvements.

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.