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Valve has today released a new Steam Client Beta, which amongst other things tweaks the new Big Picture Mode that is also in a special Beta that was taken from the Steam Deck.

For the new Big Picture Mode here's the changes:

  • Removed Steam Deck Rewards section from Account page.
  • Fixed issues interacting with spotlighted games under What’s New.
  • Forced GPU acceleration on for Linux users who may have disabled it a long time ago. This is needed for the UI to be performant. This can still be disabled with the command-line option -cef-disable-gpu. It can also be forced enabled via -cef-force-gpu.
  • Temporarily hiding System Info under Settings as a work-around for crashes for users with older NVIDIA drivers.

As a reminder: to use the new Big Picture Mode you need to launch Steam with "-gamepadui" as a launch argument as I showed in a previous video:

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Other changes include:

General

  • Fix an issue where new Big Picture Mode notifications were showing up in desktop mode

Sign In

  • Fix a case where if the sign-in UI had cached credentials which had become invalid, it could get stuck and not accept valid credentials thereafter

Steam Input

  • Gyro Enabling: The "Touch" option is now available to controllers which do not have capacitive touch sensors - Moving joysticks out of their deadzone now counts as a "Touch".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Apps, Beta, Misc, Steam, Valve
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7 comments

crabel Nov 1, 2022
Does not really work for me. I usually start Steam with the -no-browser flag (The Steam browser really needs a lot of CPU, which is actually a common problem, I found lots of posts about it) and the current beta crashes at startup.

When I omit the flag, Steam starts but for some reason only some of my games are there. I have added another Steam Library Folder and it doesn't seem to work anymore.

When I go to settings and click "Steam Library Folders", I can see both locations but one is "unusable". The other one seems to work just fine. I can repair the working location but can't even click on the second one.

So, I have disabled the beta now and everything works again.
Mar2ck Nov 1, 2022
It's weird that they'd only force-enable GPU acceleration on Linux since lots of Windows users were also having that problem. But it looks like if you're on Linux + Nvidia then it'll just fallback to slow software rendering anyway so I hope they fix those driver woes before this reaches stable.
buckysrevenge Nov 1, 2022
Quoting: Mar2ckIt's weird that they'd only force-enable GPU acceleration on Linux since lots of Windows users were also having that problem. But it looks like if you're on Linux + Nvidia then it'll just fallback to slow software rendering anyway so I hope they fix those driver woes before this reaches stable.
I'd be fine with it being a little slow if it didn't sometimes change my audio settings that I manually set up within their application and inconsistently highlighting games when browsing them in my library. 🙄 Until then I'm sticking to old BPM on my htpc
deathxxx Nov 1, 2022
Super laggy on library menu with Nvidia. Not for me.
Web menu's are ok, like browsing store.
But i'm here not for browsing store. Back to normal.


Last edited by deathxxx on 1 November 2022 at 7:35 pm UTC
adolson Nov 2, 2022
Still can't play Elden Ring with a controller with this new interface, because it appears to have no Desktop controller configuration option (at least not that I could find), and that is the only way it was working in the old Big Picture Mode (or desktop mode, for that matter).

Edit: I see the Desktop config in yesterday's update, but Elden Ring still doesn't work. :(


Last edited by adolson on 3 November 2022 at 1:41 pm UTC
RevenantDak Nov 2, 2022
How do I create or add the "-gamepadui" command to a Steam shortcut on the SteamOS's Desktop mode. I get a permissions error, and I don't know enough Linux to fix it.
Hundvd7 Dec 3, 2022
Quoting: RevenantDakHow do I create or add the "-gamepadui" command to a Steam shortcut on the SteamOS's Desktop mode.
I tried doing that on my steam deck, and a small warning: Desktop Control mapping doesn't work at all. So if you want to use it there, you would need an external keyboard+mouse or always press the Steam button to have a mouse control on the right trackpad.

Which is why I assume Valve hasn't made it work on SteamOS themselves. So I'm just gonna wait for that before trying to figure out how to hack it to work
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