If you follow the statistics that Steam is publishing month by month and you will know that its use in GNU / Linux does not finish taking off, while other operating systems like Windows 10 do not stop growing. Fortunately that has not prevented Valve from continuing to work to improve its platform in the Linux distributions.

Valve has released this morning a new beta of the Steam client, and between bug fixes and major improvements to the Steam Controller, have been cast important and expected improvements for GNU / Linux. The most important is that it will finally start to work by default and with the open source graphics drivers in the most modern distributions.

“Improved interactions between runtime and Steam distribution libraries, which should allow Steam to run ” out-of-the-box ” with open source graphics controllers in modern distributions,” read in the release notes. beta. “If you are using an old distribution or experiencing problems, use STEAM RUNTIME PREFER HOST LIBRARIES = 0 to return to the previous behavior.”

This way they should start to solve some of the problems of those who decide not to install private controllers of their graphs. In the same direction they have continued to update the libxcb library to solve some DRI3 related and reported crashes experienced by some open driver users.

Valve also has implemented the detection of inactivity in Linux, a function that takes a long time in the rest of platforms and that will cause that in chat our state becomes absent when we take time without touching keys in the PC. In addition Vulkan applications have been added on keyboard and mouse, the Vulkan loader to allow Xlib support, and unifies the closure to the client tray for all platforms, even distros that do not have a system tray itself .

During the next few days, users who have activated the Steam betas will be able to experience the changes until all these improvements are taken to all users soon with the release of the final version of the update. Good news therefore for all gamer linuxeros who use the Valve platform.

Driver improvements and Big Picture

In addition to these changes in GNU / Linux, the Steam beta has also continued to improve the functionality of its Steam Controllers, improving mapping, general operation and support for configurations of other controls such as XBox One and XBox 360, as well As third party controllers designed for the PlayStation 4. The complete list is in the changelog.

Finally, Steam also fixes some disk space errors, and improves support in Big Picture mode to use the keyboard superimposed on games that have launchers. In this mode they have also improved the display in retina devices of macOS, and of course, also have solved a good collection of bugs reported by the users.