14 DAY TRIAL // Valve is moving much quicker now with the SteamOS updates, and it looks like its makers are trying to push fixes and improvements ahead of the November 10 launch for the Steam Machines.
We had a new SteamOS Beta release just a few days ago and now all those changes have been pushed into the stable branch. It used to take a lot longer than that before the updates went from Beta to Stable, but that's not true anymore. All the fixes in the Beta have been implemented, along with some security fixes.
SteamOS 2.0 is now based on Debian 8.0 "Jessie," and from the looks of it this is the version that will ship with the Steam Machines. Valve has yet to confirm this in a more official manner, but they already changed the FAQ on the website, and they haven't touched the old version in quite a while.
What's new in SteamOS 2.0
The official version number for SteamOS 2.0 is 2.40, but if you have it installed, it doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that you'll be prompted to upgrade, and this is what changed.
"This update changes how future SteamOS updates are applied. We used to always apply pending SteamOS updates at shutdown. Now the user will have to explicitly acknowledge the Steam alert in order to apply the updates. With this release, installation on NVMe drives is now supported. A few packages have had their version numbers change to fix a bookkeeping problem," reads the announcement made by Valve.
As usual, you can download SteamOS right now from Softpedia and give it a try. You will have to install it, as there is no Live CD available. Also, the regular image will require a 1TB disk, but there is also a flavor that has a handy Debian installer.