Valve updates Steam with more Linux improvements, new game properties UI

A fresh Beta update for the Steam Client has rolled out and it seems Valve have begun modernising more parts of the UI, along with Linux fixes.

For the Steam Library, they've now ripped out the old Properties dialog with one that more closely matches their newer design style found elsewhere like with chat settings and they also fixed displaying the coming soon date for a pre-loaded game.

Here's a quick look at what it looks like (click to enlarge) in the new Beta:

There's a whole new design with a sidebar instead of tabs along the top, with a box for launch arguments now just always visible and a whole page just for Compatibility which is where you will find the Steam Play settings now. Overall, it looks nice and sleek and seems to do the job just fine as before. I'm sure it will annoy someone though, change always does.

Just for Linux - Valve also improved the performance of processing incremental Vulkan shader database updates, they fixed several issues around skipped Vulkan shader processing continuing in the background after a game has started and for NVIDIA GPU users they've currently disabled shader processing due to driver issues that are "being looked into". Hopefully NVIDIA will be able to sort that soon to give us all a better experience.

A new networking option was also added:

P2P connections now may attempt to negotiate a direct connection (punch NAT), if needed, to prevent connections from having very high latency. Added an option in the In-Game settings panel to control when your IP address is shared.