Valve Releases Major Steam Client Update with New Downloads Page, Linux Improvements

Steam Client Update

Valve released today a new major update to the Steam Client for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, with new features and numerous improvements for gamers.

The biggest new feature of the new Steam Client update is a brand new downloads page that’s easier to use and has a new design. The new download page now displays the total progress, including disk allocation process, when downloading or updating a game, as well as a faded progress bar and percent completed for partially completed downloads or updates.

In addition, the new downloads page will now display a new icon next to a game’s title with a tooltip showing the type of content included in the update (e.g. Downloadable Content, Game Content, Shader Pre-caching, or Workshop Content). Moreover, users will now be able to re-order the download queue using drag and drop, as well as to launch a game or suspend download throttling from the context menu of the actively downloading game.

Lastly, the new downloads page turns the old “View News” button into a “Patch Notes” link that will open an overlay with the most recent patch notes for the respective game.

Another new feature in the new Steam Client update is a new implementation of the storage management section that allows mounting of library folders on read-only drives, allows removing of empty library folders on fixed drives, and includes an updated Steam library folder UI to make it easier to manage content across multiple drives.

For Linux users, the new Steam Client update brings back compatibility with the NixOS distribution, adds support for the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) 2.0.16 library, improves support for NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers by making the /usr/share/nvidia directory available to the container to allow that app-specific profiles to be applied, fixes web views incompatibility the FreeType in certain distributions, and makes the library pinning process faster during startup after runtime updates.

Among other improvements, the new Steam Client update adds detection of HTC Vive Pro 2 VR headset, along with a prompt to install the Vive Pro 2 driver, improves support for USB-connected VR headsets, adds support for the current set of PowerA Xbox Series X controllers, improves support for Xbox Series X controllers, improves support for OpenXR apps, and updates Steam library’s folders dialog to better manage locally installed game content.

Scout runtime 0.20210906.1:
Use readlink -f instead of realpath for better compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04
Heavy runtime 0.20210907.0:
Add libcups.so to the runtime

Last but not least, this update removes the Recent Friend Activity shelf and streamlines the creation of a new library folder during the installation of a game. Of course, numerous bugs and crashes were fixed to make your Steam Client experience better. Check out the full release notes for more details, and make sure that you update your Steam Client to the latest version as soon as possible.

Update 14/09/21: Valve released today another update to the Steam Client with more improvements for Linux systems. The update improves compatibility with the deprecated SDL_AUDIODRIVER=pulse environment variable setting, better handling of Linux distributions that don’t ship with Zenity, and better compatibility with Ubuntu 14.04 systems.

Last updated 3 years ago

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