14 DAY TRIAL // Valve released on Tuesday a new beta update of its Debian-based SteamOS gaming Linux distribution for Steam Machines and anyone else who wants to run SteamOS on their personal computers.
The SteamOS 2.145 update was pushed earlier today to the Brewmaster Beta channel for public testing, and it comes just one week after the SteamOS 2.141 Beta release to fix some upgrade issues reported by users, as well as to bump the kernel to a new version.
SteamOS 2.145 Beta runs the latest Linux 4.14.13 kernel, which includes patches against the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, and other security fixes. Valve updated all kernel-related packages to be compatible with Linux kernel 4.14.13.
These include the firmware-free and firmware-nonfree packages, which contain both free/open-source and proprietary drivers for various hardware components. On top of that, the Nvidia proprietary graphics driver was updated to fix a compile error with Linux 4.14.13.
Today's SteamOS 2.145 Beta update also updates the libglvnd component so that it no longer conflicts with the old libglvnd-nvidia one, and adds the transitional glx-alternative-fglrx and fglrx-driver packages to allow upgrades from older versions of SteamOS.
SteamOS is alive and kicking
Valve updating SteamOS on a regular basis means that SteamOS is alive and kicking, and we could even see a new, major stable update soon if we're lucky. The current stable release is SteamOS 2.121, which runs the now deprecated Linux 4.11.12 kernel.
That means SteamOS is still based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" operating system series, so we hope to see it rebased on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" series soon. Until then, you can download and install the SteamOS 2.145 Beta right now and report any issues you might encounter.