Steam Client Beta updated with PipeWire desktop capture for Remote Play

Valve continue upgrading and tweaking the Steam client with a fresh Beta version being released today with a couple of tweaks that are interesting for Linux users.

Some of the issues fixed are for everyone including slow startup after suspend, Cloud Sync will now happen as soon as possible to avoid delays launching games and for Remote Play they fixed using multiple PS5 controllers from the Steam Link app.

Just for Linux though these caught my eye today:

• Enabled pipewire desktop capture by default on Linux, pass -nopipewire on the command line to disable it
• Fixed Linux games seeing multiple controllers when Steam controller configuration support is enabled
• Fixed Linux clients not getting any controller input once streaming starts

Some real nice fixes, the controller issues are something I came up against a couple of times. The first one is the bigger and more interesting change as PipeWire is basically the next-generation of audio and video on Linux. As the official website states:

It provides a low-latency, graph based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both pulseaudio and JACK. PipeWire was designed with a powerful security model that makes interacting with audio and video devices from containerized applications easy, with supporting Flatpak applications being the primary goal. Alongside Wayland and Flatpak we expect PipeWire to provide a core building block for the future of Linux application development.

So now that Valve are using it for Remote Play, perhaps this will work even better (especially on Wayland). This is quite likely another improvement to ready up for the Steam Deck, since we already know games will be played on it inside a Wayland session along with it using Gamescope.