Valve has released a new Beta update for Steam, shortly after promoting one of the largest versions in the last couple of years.

Given the fact that the latest update for the Steam platform arrived only a few days ago, it's quite interesting to see that the new Beta is actually quite large. The developers could have postponed the stable version for another week just to implement these new features and fixes, but it looks like we'll have to wait a little bit longer.

According to the changelog, the colors and other visual details have been adjusted for the interface, the Screenshots user interface has been updated, white scrollbars are no longer appearing in web views, trade links are no longer causing the web view to become unresponsive if closed, the detection of links in chat has been improved, the application startup time has been improved, the daisywheel is no longer trying to keep typing capital letters if the left trigger is no longer pressed, Big Picture no longer fails to capitalize the first word when typing in the daisywheel, and some small navigation and transition issues in the profile and activity feed have been fixed.

Also, the software decoder performance when using Intel QuickSync hardware encoding is now much better, Intel hardware decoding support using VAAPI on Linux and SteamOS has been added, an issue in the Windows DXVA decoder that could cause occasional black screen flashing has been fixed, the ability to create, play, and manage Playlists has been added in Steam Music Beta, the “Play Next” functionality has been removed in favor of simplicity, and error reports now make it easier for users to diagnose VR mode problems.

This is the Steam Beta branch, which means that users will need to open Settings and choose the Beta option in order to get these latest changes. You will be prompted to restart the client and then you will be able to run the new Beta build.

You have to keep in mind that after you change to the Beta channel, the application will no longer be stable. You might experience various problems that haven't been fixed yet or other unknown issues. If that is the case, just open the Settings menu and switch back to the Stable branch by opting out of the Beta.

If you don’t have the client, you can download the Steam for Linux installer from Softpedia. This is not the actual application, but a small tool provided by Valve that downloads the software and takes care of any dependencies.