Valve is getting really close to the launch of the Steam Machines, and the developers are preparing the SteamOS distro. They have just released a new stable update, and it comes with a ton of updates.

SteamOS is the Linux distribution that powers up the Steam Machines. It's based on Debian, and its makers are trying to push all the latest updates just in time for the official launch.

We've seen that SteamOS was updated almost on a weekly basis for the past couple of months, making the "Brewmaster" branch a really advanced and powerful OS.

A SteamOS Beta was made available just last week, and now all of those packages have been migrated to the stable branch. The biggest and most important update is, of course, the migration to the Linux kernel 4.1 LTS branch, which also comes with a number of specific patches made by Valve.

It's interesting to note that despite its size, the migration to the new kernel has been rather smooth, and users haven't reported any kind of issues.

SteamOS is ready

We've been using SteamOS for quite a while now, and it looks like the developers have been ready with it for quite a while. That doesn't mean that there is no room for improvements, but it's already better than what Sony or Microsoft are doing.

"This is a large update, moving to the 4.1 kernel and updated video drivers for NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards. Also blacklisted various keyboards and mice that were erroneously showing up as joystick devices," noted the developers in the official announcement.

According to the changelog, udebs from brewmaster is now being used rather than brewmaster_beta, support has been added for multiple overlay planes, fixing on-screen keyboard in new Steam Client Beta, MySQL has been upgraded to version 5.7, and the latest Nvidia and AMD drivers have been added to the repos.

You can download the latest SteamOS from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that if you choose the image and not the installer, you're going to need a 1TB partition or drive.