14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has released a sleuth of updates for the Steam client, and the developers are preparing for another major stable update. The Linux platform didn't get any special attention, but many of the improvements made apply to all the supported OSes.
The Steam for Linux client is on par with the other versions, for the most part, but there are still things to fix and improve. The Steam project works like any other, and it has a development cycle. The only problem is that it's not predictable, and it doesn't have any kind of schedule attached to. Basically, you can't know for sure how long it will take until a new stable version is released.
Valve developers have their hands full with SteamOS and all that it implies, so it's not likely that we'll see any kind of big features land in the regular Steam client anytime soon. That would mean implementing those features in the operating system as well, and it can complicate things.
Lots of Steam Beta updates have been released
The last couple of weeks there have been quite a few releases in the Steam development cycle, which means that we're heading towards a more important and consistent update. Quite a few fixes have made their way into the client and even if it's nothing too big, it's still interesting.
According to the changelog, the downloads page now shows disk usage as MB/sec, the navigation model when using a game controller in the Big Picture has been fixed, the System Menu has been updated, a custom video player for watching streaming videos has been added, the friends UI performance with very large friends lists has been improved, the ability to edit game controller mappings for non-XInput devices has been added, and lots of translation updates have landed.
You can download the Steam for Linux client from Softpedia. Please keep in mind that this is just an installer from Valve, not the entire client.