Valve released a fresh Beta update across Steam Deck, Steam Big Picture and SteamVR that includes lots of subtle visual tweaks to the UI to make it look a bit fancier.
Testing it on Steam Deck: a lot of it is tweaking the colours without changing the actual layout. First example below here is the Home section where you can see more vibrant game background art, along with the colour separation between the game list and the bottom section being removed. The bottom bar also has some transparency to it to show colours behind it rather than being a solid black. First image is the old one, second is the new one:
Original Home
New Home
Another small change noticed is in the Steam Library. It's again a bit darker, and when you move over a game in the list it will splash a bit of matching background colour around it as you'll see below again with the original first and the new look second.
Old Library
New Library
General
- Visual tweaks to Steam Deck, Big Picture Mode and SteamVR: Many small changes throughout to make the user interface a more visually-rich experience in Home, Library and other areas.
- Nicer layout for Soundtracks pages. These pages are now easier to navigate in Big Picture Mode and feature larger artwork on Desktop.
- Fixed some layout and interaction bugs in the Media viewer.
Steam Input
- Fix: Gyro Joystick mode: Core gyro quaternion is updated even when the app requesting it is not focused.
See the differences in the Soundtrack page below. First image is the old one, second is the new one:
Older Soundtrack Style
Newer Soundtrack Style
Desktop Beta changelog here and Steam Deck Beta changelog here. They're both the same.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Nice changes, but making the album art smaller and the download button bigger is the opposite of improvement IMHO (unless the images are reversed).Nope, images are correct and yeah that doesn't particularly feel like an improvement, the buttons are way too big and you actually now see less of the list.
the buttons are way too big
Maybe this has to do with translations: in the current version when the interface is in French the labels are larger and the cover feels misaligned as a result. (eg. “View Store Page” vs “Consulter la page du magasin”)
So maybe (hopefully?) they set the width of the buttons to max(translations) to spot that kind of issues during the beta and will revert to buttons that adapt to the actual text length on release?
Last edited by Nic264 on 10 November 2023 at 12:12 pm UTC
Nice changes, but making the album art smaller and the download button bigger is the opposite of improvement IMHO (unless the images are reversed).Nope, images are correct and yeah that doesn't particularly feel like an improvement, the buttons are way too big and you actually now see less of the list.
Awful change to the media player. Who the hell approved that? Glad I don't use Steam for playing music, I guess.
ElectricPrism Nov 12, 2023
Nice changes, but making the album art smaller and the download button bigger is the opposite of improvement IMHO (unless the images are reversed).Nope, images are correct and yeah that doesn't particularly feel like an improvement, the buttons are way too big and you actually now see less of the list.
Awful change to the media player. Who the hell approved that? Glad I don't use Steam for playing music, I guess.
I wouldn't call the old version "good", maybe some people liked it? But I would be happy if they kept messing with the Media Player until it comes out right instead of not at all.
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