Valve Finally Makes Steam Work Out-of-the-Box with Open-Source Graphics Drivers

The new Steam Client Beta update brings quite a lot of changes (see them all in the changelog attached at the end of the story), but we’re very interested in the Linux ones, which appears to let Steam work out-of-the-box with open-source graphics drivers on various modern GNU/Linux distributions, while implementing a new setting for older ones to improve the interaction between Steam’s runtime and system’s host libraries. Additionally, Valve implemented idle detection for Linux platforms, automatically switching the friend status in the built-in chat to Away/Snooze when you’re not at pressing any buttons on your PC, improves keyboard and mice support for Vulkan apps when using the Overlay, as well as the Vulkan loader to enable Xlib support. It also looks like the close-to-tray behavior is now unified with other platforms besides Steam OS.