14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has just published a new stable version of SteamOS, which brings a number of security updates and a new font for the main interface. It's not a big update, but the addition of the new font should make it interesting.
The number of updates for SteamOS has been decreasing steadily in the past few months, and it looks like Valve is pretty content with the way things are right now for the Linux distribution. The fact that no new features have been added in such a long time is a good sign for the OS, which will probably ship in this form in November. The current iteration of the OS is based on Debian 7.1, but the developers are already working on new version, 2.0, that is using the newly released Debian 8 "Jessie."
It's difficult to say whether Valve will be ready in time for the November release with this new version, but it's unlikely that it will happen. They don't have a high cadence for development, and they probably want something stable and proven for the launch. It will become more a problem once we get closer to the November release.
The new font for SteamOS is really important
Some of you might have one of their eyebrows raised by now and are thinking that fonts are not all that important, especially in an operating system that is aimed at gamers, but you would be surprised. In fact, many of the SteamOS users were installing the Liberation font from the repos and changed it manually. It's a much better choice, and Valve devs saw this. It's not activated by default, but at least it's present, and users don't have to install it themselves.
The rest of the changes that have landed in SteamOS have to do with various security fixes for some important components like Curl, CUPS, OpenSSL, Iceweasel, and a few others. You can download the latest stable version of SteamOS from Softpedia. Please keep in mind that you can't run this as live CD, and you need an entire partition for it.