14 DAY TRIAL // Valve's engineers have pushed a new build of the SteamOS Debian-based gaming operating system, version 2.80, to the brewmaster_beta channel for public testing.
SteamOS 2.80 Beta is here more than a month after the release of the stable SteamOS 2.70 update, and it promises some exciting new features for those who use AMD GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) to play their Steam games.
Therefore, the biggest new feature introduced in today's SteamOS 2.80 Brewmaster Beta update is a new AMD GPU PRO graphics driver that has been injected with Vulkan and VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) support.
Version RC1 (Release Candidate) 1 of this AMD GPU PRO video driver has been included in SteamOS 2.80 Beta, and users are being informed by Valve's engineers working on SteamOS that it's only enabled for "Bonaire" GPUs at this time.
"We will be enabling the new driver for other GPUs as AMD completes testing," reads today's announcement. "If you have problems or bugs with the new driver, please report them to AMD's Steam Linux forum, which AMD will be monitoring."
The newest security fixes are finally here
When SteamOS 2.70 was released, it was based on the latest software repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 (Jessie) operating system, but as mentioned before, more than a month has passed since then, so SteamOS 2.80 Beta had to contain the newest security fixes.
The changelog for SteamOS 2.80 Beta mentions updates for open-source components like Iceweasel, Expat, imlib2, libarchive, libgd2, libidn, libndp, librsvg, libtasn1-6, MySQL-5.5, OpenSSL, Jansson, and tzdata, as well as a fix for a dead lock bug in DRM kernel module.
Last but not least, SteamOS 2.80 Beta, which you can download right now via our website, adds support for Logitech touchpads and special devices by injecting the hid-logitech-hidpp driver to input-modules of the Linux kernel.