SteamOS update 2.121 pushed to brewmaster beta

Jul 26, 2017 00:30 GMT  ·  By

Valve's SteamOS engineers are continuing to improve the Debian-based SteamOS gaming operating system that powers the Steam Machines, and they've just released today a new Beta update.

The SteamOS 2.121 update was pushed earlier to the Brewmaster Beta channel, and it looks like it comes only two and a half weeks after the previous release, namely SteamOS 2.119, which upgraded the kernel packages to Linux 4.11.8 to fix a crash with the PlayStation 4 Dual Shock controller when used with the Steam for Linux client.

Now the SteamOS 2.121 is here to bump the kernel packages (linux, firmware-free, and firmware-nonfree) again, rebasing them on the upstream Linux 4.11.12, as well as to import some of the latest security updates from the Debian Jessie repositories, fixing important issues for Apache2, Samba, BIND9, and Evince applications.

Flatpak support now available on SteamOS

To show non-believers that it wants to make SteamOS a more modern and great gaming operating system, Valve also added support for the latest Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework into the distribution's repository, along with all of its dependencies.

We believe that Valve is also working hard on rebasing SteamOS on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system series, as the gaming OS is currently still in sync with the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" repositories, though the OS was recently updated to version 8.9.

As usual, you can download the SteamOS 2.121 Beta installation images right now from Valve or through our web portal if you want to take this release for a test drive on your personal computer, but please try to keep in mind that it's an unstable build that may contain unresolved or unknown issues.