Valve have released the latest stable update to the Steam Client today for PC and Steam Deck, which fixes a whole lot of issues. This bundles up all the changes from many multiple Beta releases and there's a lot to go over.
One of the interesting tweaks is that Valve adjusted the CSS to "reduce feature leaks", I guess they're growing a little tired of certain people scraping it constantly to see what they're working on. I wonder if they have something specific coming up they don't want spoilt? What do you think?
The changelog is the same across desktop and Steam Deck, since this is a Steam Client update. The full list of changes are:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.General
- Fixed Steam client menus opening in separate windows from main window after sleep/account change.
- Fixed crash when playing back certain media in Steam music player.
- Fixed issue loading and saving the app achievement cache file which in some cases caused excessive memory usage in steamwebhelper.
- Fixed notifications not being displayed on Windows when the desktop is focused.
- Fixed notifications intermittently being queued until a game is launched.
- Reduced network traffic at startup and reconnect.
- Fixed regression causing Steam News button to not work.
- Fixed secondary context menu opening when right-clicking open context menu.
- Fix an error when launching some games that was introduced in the previous beta.
- If a game failed to update, show why on the details page as well as the downloads page.
- Fixed embedded browser views showing with high contrast settings when enabled on Windows.
- Made taking screenshots more responsive.
- Increased brightness of HDR screenshots.
- Modified CSS classnames to reduce package size and reduce feature leaks.
Big Picture
- Fixed an issue where after playing a game it would require extra B button presses to back out of the game's library page.
- Fixed support alert messages intermittently producing an error at startup.
Steam Cloud
- Fixed case where files for one Steam account could be overwritten by files from another Steam account if the first account had logged in but not played the game yet on the device.
Steam Input
- New Configurator feature "Swap Left with Right": While editing a Controller Configuration, you can Swap the behavior of the Left Stick and the Right Stick, or Left Trackpad and Right Trackpad etc. Highlight the source you want to swap in the "Edit Layout" page, and the "Y" button should appear to allow the swap. This should be handy for "South Paws".
- New Mouse Action: "Reset to Horizon". This helper can reset your camera to the horizon by sending 180 degrees down, and then 90 degrees up after a very short delay. This action can be bound to any activator slot.
- New Mouse Action: "Turn Camera 360". By default this will generate 360 degrees of rotation.
- New Mouse Action: "Turn to Face Direction". When activating this, the camera will turn to face the direction you are pushing on the Left Stick (default - Track pads, DPads and Buttons can also be used). Can be combined with "Reset to Horizon" to produce a behavior similar to Splatoon's camera reset button.
- Note: The New Mouse actions all require Dots per 360 to calibrated for any of them to be accurate. To do this, use "Turn Camera 360" in combination with either "FlickStick" or "Gyro to Mouse", and make sure that one press of your "Turn Camera 360" makes one 360 turn in game. If it does not, tune the Dots per 360 setting from the Controller Quick Settings menu. You do not have to use Gyro to Mouse or FlickStick after this step.
- FlickStick mode's templates will now default to binding to the correct "Stick Click", but only in Mouse only or Mixed config templates.
- Added "Invert Command Binding" for FlickStick's Outer Ring Command.
- Added an option to allow the FlickStick to trigger a Flick Turn if the stick is thrown when the action set/action layer/mode shift is activate.
- Fixed SteamDeck Configurator Templates' FlickStick default bindings.
- Gyro Button Picker: you can now choose from any combination of pre-existing gyro enabling buttons. This replaces the "Gyro Activation" Dropdown.
- Config Defaults: Mouse templates, and "Mixed" Mouse and Gamepad Templates now use "Gyro to Mouse" instead of "As Mouse".
- Gyro to Joystick modes now no longer generate haptic events when outside the active range.
- (On those controllers with haptics support) a haptic bump will occur when gyroscope is turned on and off due to the Gyro Enable/Disable/Toggle Button, if haptics are not set to "Off". Choose to disable/enable this from the Gyro Button Picker.
- Added Dualsense and Dualshock Gyro Enable/Disable/Toggle "center touch" and "center click" for completeness/to help with certain Paddle Mods..
- Fixed inverted axes when using "Setup Device Inputs".
- Fixed swapped A/B buttons when using Nintendo GameCube controllers.
- UI: Joystick Mouse Deadzone controls now use the common Deadzone Editor.
Remote Play
- Greatly improved streaming performance on newer AMD cards.
- Increased brightness of HDR streaming.
- Added support for full HDR to HDR streaming when streaming from a Windows PC using NVIDIA or AMD hardware acceleration to another Windows PC or Mac with an HDR display. The computer receiving the stream must have Enhanced 1080p or 4K enabled in the Steam Remote Play advanced client settings.
- Fixed the streaming button staying stuck on "Stop" when the streaming client exits quickly.
- Fixed installation of Steam streaming audio drivers on macOS 14.3+.
- Fixed missing audio when streaming from macOS.
- Fixed occasional black screen flickering when streaming from macOS.
- Improved recovery from network disconnections before starting the stream.
- Fixed continually being prompted for the PIN when pairing a device.
- Fixed the performance graph being reset to icons when changing to Enhanced 1080p or Enhanced 4K.
Linux
- Fixed some causes of steamwebhelper crashes.
- Fixed slow startup on busy systems.
- Fixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.
- Changed the default scale from 200% to 150% on a 4K monitor.
- Fixed a case where the store tab would fail to display any content after maximizing the steam window.
- Fixed a case where the window may become unresponsive until resized.
- No longer listing incompatible options under an application's Compatibility settings.
- Fixed a situation where Steam would attempt to execute the Windows version of a title without using Steam Play.
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19 comments
One of the interesting tweaks is that Valve adjusted the CSS to "reduce feature leaks", I guess they're growing a little tired of certain people scraping it constantly to see what they're working on.I mean, it is weird that SteamDB knows which keyboard I've picked for my Deck.
Fixed an issue where after playing a game it would require extra B button presses to back out of the game's library page.Yay!
2 Likes, Who?
Fixed notifications intermittently being queued until a game is launched.
This was annoying me far more than it should have, nice.
0 Likes
Mohandevir May 7
Greatly improved streaming performance on newer AMD cards.
Is it true for Linux hosts?
Got lots of stuttering issues with Remote Play, since I switched to AMD.
Last edited by Mohandevir on 7 May 2024 at 5:51 pm UTC
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Mountain Man May 7
Controller customization has become so complex, you almost need an instruction manual at this point to figure it all out.
One of the interesting tweaks is that Valve adjusted the CSS to "reduce feature leaks", I guess they're growing a little tired of certain people scraping it constantly to see what they're working on. I wonder if they have something specific coming up they don't want spoilt? What do you think?Half-Life 3 confirmed! \o/
2 Likes, Who?
Greatly improved streaming performance on newer AMD cards.
Is it true for Linux hosts?
Got lots of stuttering issues with Remote Play, since I switched to AMD.
Hmm when they don't mention Linux explicitly it probably Windows-only. The Windows and Linux video encoding libraries are different so they probably don't share much code/behavior. But I could be wrong!
0 Likes
gradyvuckovic May 7
> Fixed an issue where after playing a game it would require extra B button presses to back out of the game's library page.
Yay! I experienced that again last night. Was thinking 'Jeez they need to fix that'. Bam there it is fixed, thanks Volvo!
2 Likes, Who?
Fixed an issue where after playing a game it would require extra B button presses to back out of the game's library page.Thank goodness. That's been driving me mad!
Made taking screenshots more responsive.And so has this!
2 Likes, Who?
pleasereadthemanual May 8
Fixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.
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gradyvuckovic May 8
Fixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.
True, and I'd say it mostly comes down to just the fact that Valve is a business and cares about customer service.
Realistically a lot of people are choosing to use Steam via Flatpak these days, rightly or wrongly.
If those people have a bad experience then that's "a bad Steam experience". Even if it's not officially supported. Sure Valve could say "We told you that's not officially supported" but it doesn't matter. Bad experience is bad experience, and if the bad experience happens while in Steam, that's "a bad Steam experience". Bad Steam experiences means less sales.
It's one of those "The customer is always right" situations. Doesn't matter if officially you don't support something, if that's where your users are, gotta try to make it the best experience possible. Good businesses are always bending over backwards trying to give customers good experiences.
3 Likes, Who?
pleasereadthemanual May 8
Notably, they don't do the same thing for the Snap package.Fixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.
True, and I'd say it mostly comes down to just the fact that Valve is a business and cares about customer service.
Realistically a lot of people are choosing to use Steam via Flatpak these days, rightly or wrongly.
If those people have a bad experience then that's "a bad Steam experience". Even if it's not officially supported. Sure Valve could say "We told you that's not officially supported" but it doesn't matter. Bad experience is bad experience, and if the bad experience happens while in Steam, that's "a bad Steam experience". Bad Steam experiences means less sales.
It's one of those "The customer is always right" situations. Doesn't matter if officially you don't support something, if that's where your users are, gotta try to make it the best experience possible. Good businesses are always bending over backwards trying to give customers good experiences.
0 Likes
Flatpak is the fourth most popular distro in the Steam Hardware Survey. Having had to do a bunch of stuff already on both the Steam side and the flatpak side to have container-in-a-container work at all, if there's more they can do to make it work better - why not?Fixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.
0 Likes
Just a small thing that I encountered that might be worth pointing out: Post-update, I played Stardew Valley and noticed that the scrolling was really jerky even though the game was otherwise running fine. It seems that something got messed up regarding per-game power-saving settings, because even though I already had that game set to 60fps, I had to change that to something else and then change it back to fix the problem; Turning per-game settings off and on again didn't help, I specifically had to change the refresh-rate and change it back again. I presume that it would've affected anything, but that just happened to be what I played first.
Just making a note of the fix in case anyone else runs into it.
EDIT: Just to clarify, this was on my Steam Deck.
Thanks for reminding me, Eike!
Last edited by Pengling on 8 May 2024 at 11:13 am UTC
Just making a note of the fix in case anyone else runs into it.
EDIT: Just to clarify, this was on my Steam Deck.
Thanks for reminding me, Eike!Last edited by Pengling on 8 May 2024 at 11:13 am UTC
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pleasereadthemanual May 8
I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is trying to build a Flatpak package and convince upstream to take control of it once I have it generally working.Flatpak is the fourth most popular distro in the Steam Hardware Survey. Having had to do a bunch of stuff already on both the Steam side and the flatpak side to have container-in-a-container work at all, if there's more they can do to make it work better - why not?Fixed startup delays when running in flatpak environments.Interesting that Valve cares that much about the Flatpak package, but don't want to officially adopt it.
I don't know what Valve's official statement is on the Flatpak, but I have heard they don't want to take control of it for some reason. That might be due to Steam trying to spawn another sandbox inside the Flatpak sandbox, which isn't possible. I'd be curious what exactly the situation is there.
0 Likes
Just a small thing that I encountered that might be worth pointing out: Post-update, I played Stardew Valley and noticed that the scrolling was really jerky even though the game was otherwise running fine. It seems that something got messed up regarding per-game power-saving settings, because even though I already had that game set to 60fps, I had to change that to something else and then change it back to fix the problem; Turning per-game settings off and on again didn't help, I specifically had to change the refresh-rate and change it back again. I presume that it would've affected anything, but that just happened to be what I played first.
Just making a note of the fix in case anyone else runs into it.
Is that referring to Steam Deck?
1 Likes, Who?
Is that referring to Steam Deck?Oops! Yes, it is!
Sorry for not being clear enough there - I wrote that comment quickly whilst between rounds in Stumble Guys. 
Have edited my post to clarify!Last edited by Pengling on 8 May 2024 at 11:14 am UTC
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Is that referring to Steam Deck?Oops! Yes, it is!
... and I was wondering where all those settings might be hidden... :)
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I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is trying to build a Flatpak package and convince upstream to take control of it once I have it generally working.
I can't help you there. But even if Valve, say, wanted to take over the maintenance of a flatpak that doesn't mean that any other project would want to with theirs.
I don't know what Valve's official statement is on the Flatpak, but I have heard they don't want to take control of it for some reason. That might be due to Steam trying to spawn another sandbox inside the Flatpak sandbox, which isn't possible. I'd be curious what exactly the situation is there.
Their official statement is that it's unsupported. Same as snap, and same as any distro but Ubuntu LTS and SteamOS.
Steam only officially supports Ubuntu running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or newer and SteamOS, but the Steam for Linux community is extremely resourceful and has managed to run Steam on a large variety of distros. Valve approves of these efforts but does not officially endorse or provide support for them.
Steam has been packaged as a Flatpak app by the Flathub community, but this Flatpak app is not officially supported by Valve...
Steam has been packaged as a Snap app by Canonical, but this Snap app is not officially supported by Valve.
As far as the container goes, the Steam container is the same as flatpaks - bubblewrap - and having a container in a container specifically didn't work for bubblewrap. They had to make changes on both ends so that it would work, as I already mentioned. There are probably Phoronix or similar articles going into what exactly they did to make it work.
Edit: found the change. It was
Allow a subsandbox to have a different /usr and/or /app.from flatpak 1.11.1 (in 2021) with concurrent changes to pressure-vessel. Prior to that games using the SLR or using later versions of Proton wouldn't work in the flatpak.
Steam will use this to launch games with its own container runtime
as /usr (the "Steam Linux Runtime" mechanism).
Last edited by CatKiller on 8 May 2024 at 12:45 pm UTC
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pleasereadthemanual May 8
Thanks! That's quite interesting. And yes, it wouldn't help me with my vendor, but I was curious what the reasons were...I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who is trying to build a Flatpak package and convince upstream to take control of it once I have it generally working.
I can't help you there. But even if Valve, say, wanted to take over the maintenance of a flatpak that doesn't mean that any other project would want to with theirs.
I don't know what Valve's official statement is on the Flatpak, but I have heard they don't want to take control of it for some reason. That might be due to Steam trying to spawn another sandbox inside the Flatpak sandbox, which isn't possible. I'd be curious what exactly the situation is there.
Their official statement is that it's unsupported. Same as snap, and same as any distro but Ubuntu LTS and SteamOS.
Steam only officially supports Ubuntu running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or newer and SteamOS, but the Steam for Linux community is extremely resourceful and has managed to run Steam on a large variety of distros. Valve approves of these efforts but does not officially endorse or provide support for them.Steam has been packaged as a Flatpak app by the Flathub community, but this Flatpak app is not officially supported by Valve...
Steam has been packaged as a Snap app by Canonical, but this Snap app is not officially supported by Valve.
As far as the container goes, the Steam container is the same as flatpaks - bubblewrap - and having a container in a container specifically didn't work for bubblewrap. They had to make changes on both ends so that it would work, as I already mentioned. There are probably Phoronix or similar articles going into what exactly they did to make it work.
Edit: found the change. It was
Allow a subsandbox to have a different /usr and/or /app.from flatpak 1.11.1 (in 2021) with concurrent changes to pressure-vessel. Prior to that games using the SLR or using later versions of Proton wouldn't work in the flatpak.
Steam will use this to launch games with its own container runtime
as /usr (the "Steam Linux Runtime" mechanism).
If Canonical couldn't convince Steam to take ownership of the Snap, I don't think Flathub has much of a chance.
I kind of wonder if there's much point in adopting a Flatpak package as a proprietary vendor. Upstream first needs to create some sort of package that you can package up into a Flatpak, because building from source is obviously not an option. That's almost always a .deb. So in the end you'll be maintaining two packages, at least. You can't do what Bottles did and say, "No! We only support the org.freedesktop.Platform runtime!"
Unless I'm totally wrong?
Edit: I'm probably totally wrong about that. But I wonder if any proprietary developer has actually done or is considering doing this.
Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 8 May 2024 at 1:29 pm UTC
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I kind of wonder if there's much point in adopting a Flatpak package as a proprietary vendor.
It's certainly possible with any of {flatpak, snap, appimage} to have that be your official distribution method for your software. Any of them will work on any distro. Whether there's any point for a given project is a different question. The Firefox snap and the Firefox flatpak, for example, are both owned by Mozilla, and they specifically requested the Firefox snap so that updates weren't held up by the distro's update schedule and maintenance burden. But most projects are going to be quite comfortable with fan-made binary-only packages - whether in distro repositories or container repositories - without having to do any maintenance themselves.
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