14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has released a new stable version of Steam for the Linux platform, packing quite a few new features and improvements, not to mention some optimizations for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
The company outed a lot of development versions in the last couple of months and all the features it has implemented so far have ended up in the stable client. As usual, you can expect some major changes in Steam, but the Linux ones are mostly just under the hood.
If you already have the Steam client installed, the update should download in the background and you will be prompted to upgrade the software. There is really nothing to it and users don't need to do anything extra.
Numerous changes have been implemented in the latest version of Steam, and only some are Linux-specific. One of them is the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS compatibility, which has been improved. Ubuntu is one of the most used Linux distributions out there, so it's only logical that Valve would want Steam to work as well as possible on that OS.
Also, a potential hang that occurred when using certain UI toolkits that relied on SIGCHLD has been fixed, a game crash that occurred when more than ten processes were attached to the Steam overlay has been corrected (this means that CID The Dummy is now working on Linux), and setting the voice input device in Big Picture is now possible due to a new added option.
Some other cross-platform changes have been implemented in this Steam release. For example, support for regional EULAs has been implemented, the caching of leaderboard API requests has been improved, the handling of warnings on unrecognized links in chat is now a lot better, the message that was shown when the user unblocked someone has been fixed, the keyboard accessibility in block/unblock success dialog is now a lot better, and it's now possible to remove empty sub folders after game updates.
Also, a SteamGuard UI problem preventing the login process in a few rare configurations has been fixed, it is now possible to launch games that have the start dialog stuck in the “Preparing to launch..” state, installed apps are now detecting content updates, and the progress percentage that is displayed for items that are queued for download is now shown correctly.
More details about this latest release can be found in the official announcement. Download the Steam for Linux installer from Softpedia.