14 DAY TRIAL // A new stable Steam client update has been released by Valve and the developers have finally enabled In-Home Streaming for everyone.
The In-Home Streaming feature allows users to stream games from a Windows operating system to a Linux-powered machine that also runs Steam. This is the solution proposed by Valve that practically enables Linux gamers to play any Windows-only titles, although it's rather cumbersome, to say the least.
Like any other major Steam update, the latest has been preceded by a flurry of smaller ones in the Beta branch of the software. This is basically just a collection of those features and fixes that were already available for all users of Steam Beta.
According to the changelog, the handling of corrupt data during downloads has been fixed, several small memory leaks in the Steam client have been corrected, a rare crash that occurred when workshop image update was performed inside the library details view has been fixed, DLCs can now be disabled in the DLC properties page for a game, and some AppVerifier errors and warnings caused by Steam that could make it hard for games to use AppVerifier have been fixed.
The other big feature that is being worked on by Valve developers is called Big Picture. This is an interface for Steam designed to work on big screens and controlled with the mouse or gamepad. Big Picture is more than just a skin for Steam, which means that a lot of extra effort is needed to make it function as it should.
This latest update for Steam introduced a large number of changes and fixes for Big Picture. For example, a new profile section has been added to the main menu in order to replace the old community section, all games are now filtered by default "On Platform" rather than "All Games" if you are not on Windows, the pending friends invitations are now collapsing into a single friends list entry, and a case where after accepting a friend invite on the web it would only be partially updated has been fixed.
Also, the Big Picture movie audio and video synchronization has been improved, the performance in some cases with the Big Picture window has been improved on the Linux platform, the movie playback support and the support for animated gifs has been improved as well, and adding non-Steam games is now directly supported in Big Picture.
More details about this latest build and the bugs that have been fixed can be found in the official announcement. You can download the Steam for Linux installer from Softpedia.