14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier today, April 22, 2016, Valve has pushed a new build of its Debian-based SteamOS gaming operating system, version 2.70, to the stable channels, bringing various improvements and the latest software versions.
SteamOS 2.70 has been released as a replacement for the previous stable build, version 2.64, which brought a Vulkan-powered Nvidia graphics driver, as well as the latest security fixes from the Debian GNU/Linux 8.3 "Jessie" software repositories.
SteamOS has now been rebased on the latest Debian "Jessie" point release, version 8.4, announced at the beginning of the month, and among the changes implemented by Valve's engineers in today's 2.70 stable release, we can mention PulseAudio sound server improvements, and all the upstream security updates.
"This is the same content that was released in last week's beta. Changins include pulseaudio changes to better handle profiles which change availability when the HDMI ELD changes, Debian 8.4 updates and the usual security fixes. Updated installers are also released," reads today's announcement.
What's new in SteamOS 2.70
Release highlights of SteamOS 2.70 include better support for PulseAudio profiles that modify their availability when HDMI EDL (EDID like Data) changes are being detected, GRUB2 bootloader improvements by removing the grub-gfxpayload-lists dependency and reducing screen flashing during boot, and support for steamos-compositor to select an HDMI/DP connection over other types of displays.
Moreover, SteamOS 2.70 fixes an issue with the steamos-modeswitch-inhibitor component so that the The Talos Principle game will no longer fail to start, adds a toggle for Alienware Deep Sleep in the control script, bumps the kernel ABI to 25 in the Debian Installer, and disables the Graphite font shaping library for the Iceweasel web browser.
Among the packages that have been updated, we can mention OpenSSH, Samba, APT, Cairo, Espeakup, GnuPG, GTK+ 2.0, imlib2, librsvg, libsndfile, nettle, PCRE3, tzdata, SRTP, sane-backends, initramfs-tools, Git, BIND9, Jasper, and Perl. You can download SteamOS 2.70 right now via our website or directly from Valve's SteamOS homepage. Existing users don't need to download anything, just make sure you have the latest updates installed.