Also introduces idle detection and updates the Vulkan loader

Jan 5, 2017 22:00 GMT  ·  By

Today, January 5, 2017, Valve's engineers working on Steam announced the availability of a new Beta build of the Steam Client, which appears to address a bunch of Linux bugs, as well as add numerous Steam Controller improvements.

The new Steam Client Beta update brings quite a lot of changes (see them all in the changelog attached at the end of the story), but we're very interested in the Linux ones, which appear to let Steam work out of the box with open-source graphics drivers on various modern GNU/Linux distributions, while implementing a new setting for older ones to improve the interaction between Steam's runtime and system's host libraries.

"Improved interactions between the Steam runtime and host distribution libraries, which should let Steam work out of the box with open-source graphics drivers on modern distributions. If using an older distribution or running into problems, use STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES=0 to revert to previous behavior," read the release notes.

Vulkan loader updated to enable Xlib support, idle detection added

Additionally, Valve implemented idle detection for Linux platforms, automatically switching the friend status in the built-in chat to Away/Snooze when you're not at pressing any buttons on your PC, improves keyboard and mice support for Vulkan apps when using the Overlay, as well as the Vulkan loader to enable Xlib support. It also looks like the close-to-tray behavior is now unified with other platforms besides Steam OS.

Users can now use the "STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE=0" setting to force the Steam Client to close to tray on GNU/Linux distributions that don't offer a proper system tray area. Other than that, the new Steam Client Beta update addresses some DRI3-related crashes with open-source graphics drivers by shipping with an updated libxcb library, and adds a bunch of Steam Controller improvements.

All these goodies and much more are coming soon to the Steam Client when a new stable build is released. Again, you can view all the improvements in the changelog attached below, and if you can't wait until the new stable version arrives, you can switch right now to the Beta channel in the General section of the Setting dialog, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release build.

Steam Client Beta Changelog