Steam Beta removes option to globally disable Steam Play plus Game Recording improvements

Another fresh Steam Client Beta for Desktop and Steam Deck fixing up some bugs, plus some improvements for Game Recording.

There's one fix that's specific to the Steam Deck that Valve noted: "Fix overlay hanging for some games in Desktop mode after the game restarts itself". Plus one just for the Desktop client: "Fix a case where the wrong DPI scaling factor would be used for systems using a non-gnome based session with an active gnome-desktop-portal service."

As for the rest it's the same across both Desktop and Deck:

General

• Fix progress bar not updating during game update and move operations involving large files
• Fix overlay hanging in some games on macOS and Linux after the game restarts itself

Game Recording

• Added support for automatic gain control for recording microphone
• Added support for forcing microphone input to mono for misconfigured stereo mic setups
• Fixed a bug preventing loading of additional programs to record audio at client start time

Big Picture Mode

• Fix keyboard input dialog in-game failing to close/re-open properly if Steam Overlay is toggled while visible
• Fixed multi-line mode support in the dialog shown by the ShowGamepadTextInput API call in Steamworks

Linux

• Always allow the Steam client to fallback to X11 when SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER/SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER is set to wayland.
• Remove the UI toggle to disable Steam Play globally, correctly reflecting that Steam Play is always enabled on Linux. Steam Play was always partially active even when set to off in the UI as it is a requirement for Steam client operation.

Changelogs: Desktop | Steam Deck

As a reminder on the last one: Steam Play itself is not just Proton. It's also used for the Steam Linux Runtime for Native Linux games too. Plus you can also use it for tools like Luxtorpeda. In a previous Steam Beta update Valve made a change where Native Linux titles now use the Linux Runtime container by default, matching what they do on the Steam Deck for better overall compatibility.