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The new Steam Library Beta is officially out for you to try

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The day has finally arrived, Valve have now put out a Beta for the massive overhaul to the Steam Library so you can try it yourself. A huge amount has changed but likely some rough edges to be found since it's not quite finished. Promising though, a lot better in many ways than the old and stale interface that Steam has currently.

Here's how it will look now:

My favourite features is the new Collections which massively expands the old category system. Instead of having a single plain category to add games into you can now sort them by specific features automatically or have them manually sorted and picked by you.

Additionally, you can sort games into digital shelves on your Steam Library home page. To have quick and easy access to things. The new drag and drop abilities are sweet too, make a collection and then drag a bunch of games into it. Super handy!

Once you've made a collection, you can then add it to your Home as a shelf like my example above for "Kid Friendly" games which I then added and it works really well:

There's quite a lot of smaller touches to this large update. One that instantly caught my eye was the new icon next to the name of a game. It shows you now if someone on your Steam Friends list is currently playing it:

So in the picture above we have Dota 2, Dota Underlords, Rocket League and Slay the Spire all currently being played by people on my own Steam Friends list. It's such a small touch but quite a clever little addition I think.

One thing I am already not sold on, is how they've merged activity on game pages in your Library. So now you see game updates announcements, plus friend activity all together for each game by default. It makes it feel a little messy. There's a button to view all news which is good, but the interface there is a damn slow pop-up. As an example, here's Slay the Spire with an update in between some random friends doing things in it (it gets messier when friends do a lot):

There's a but coming…but I do love the new friends side-bar on each game page. Showing who is on that game right now, who has played it recently and so on. Features like this can really help people decide to pick up a game again.

Also added in this update is a new section in the Steam settings, allowing you to adjust the size of all the elements shown on the Steam Home. If you find all the images too big, you can adjust them down to a smaller size. Additionally there's options for a Low Bandwidth Mode and a Low Performance Mode.

Valve also seem to have removed the syndicated news section from game pages, something that I'm quite thankful for. I do read other sites quite regularly, I have no issues with many. The problem is, the news that appeared on Steam Library pages for games was often nothing to do with the actual game you're currently viewing. So I'm glad to see it gone in favour of more useful things.

How to access the Steam Library Beta? The usual way, by opting into the Steam Client Beta in the settings like so:

It will then download and you will need to restart Steam for it to

These additional changes also come with the Library Beta:

SteamVR

  • Added playtime tracking for SteamVR workshop items and for SteamVR itself
  • Titles that are hidden in the Steam Library will now be hidden in the recently played UI in SteamVR Home

Linux

  • Fixed a problem where the screen could go to sleep while using a controller
  • Fixed cases where the on-screen keyboard would steal focus
  • Added support for enabling the Big Picture overlay when using controllers with the desktop client
  • Help > System Information now runs several tests to check for common problems with your Steam Runtime environment. Make sure to include it in your bug reports!
  • Steam Linux Runtime updated to 0.20190913.0: merged i386/ and amd64/ directories for better layout and space savings.

The ability to now use the Big Picture Overlay when in desktop mode was available on Windows before. I've given it a quick test run and it does now work but it's really rough. With Rocket League for example, it stole all the input making it unplayable. Thankfully, using the normal desktop Overlay works as expected. Going to need a few adjustments there and that might even be specific to KDE which I use.

Another issue I've come across, is there now seems to be no way to view just Linux games. Previously, you could switch between Linux games and all games but now that option is just gone. It also no longer tells you if a game is running with Steam Play, that bit is also just gone.

If you do find issues, you can report them on Valve's steam-for-linux GitHub page.

You can see the dedicated page on Steam here for the new Beta.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Beta, Steam
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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cprn Sep 18, 2019
Oh, man! Steam lagged for me so badly yesterday just after update, and then when the new library loaded I thought something broke! Then I tried to run it again and it was lagging even worse, all the transition animations were hanging my system, until it generated its precious shaders or whatever it finished doing 5 minutes later... then it went almost smooth. It's perfectly fine performance-wise after disabling the extra news (it downloads stuff from store) and heavy animations (load up the CPU drastically on my machine, even though I have GPU acceleration on, GTX 1070). You can do so in Settings -> Library.

Functionality-wise, yeah, I agree, it's two steps back for us.


Last edited by cprn on 18 September 2019 at 7:18 am UTC
Philadelphus Sep 18, 2019
Quoting: DuncI had to resort to the magic SysReq key to reboot.
The what now? :O

Quoting: Purple Library GuyThey should hire a couple of library people. We know how to do searches. And subject headings.
Do we need a standardized Library of Congress/Dewey Decimal System for games, and how hard would it be to create one? :)
eldaking Sep 18, 2019
Quoting: Purple Library GuyThey should hire a couple of library people. We know how to do searches. And subject headings.

Ha, as if there was an entire area where people learned how to catalogue media. Next you will tell me it has existed for longer than computers themselves, and that it is named "library" like the game collection on Steam.
Felix Sep 18, 2019
I've noticed some problems with steamwebhelper, crashes and can start using massive amounts of resources, 25 out of 32BG (ameliorated by turning off advanced graphical options), bit annoying.
Anyone else having the same problems?
Nanobang Sep 18, 2019
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On a scale of 1 to 5 I give it a KLUNK.

Slow, bloated, CPU intensive, prone to lockup, and inscrutable to customize, Steam has swapped out an awkward library for one made from gold plated horse shit. I'll keep using the Beta, but it will be the Big Picture beta until this thing comes back from the intensive surgery it so desperately needs.
Dunc Sep 18, 2019
Quoting: Philadelphus
Quoting: DuncI had to resort to the magic SysReq key to reboot.
The what now? :O
Raising elephants is so utterly boring. :)
Micromegas Sep 18, 2019
Quoting: EMO GANGSTERlooks like we can no longer use Remote Play on non-steam games? it seems like I can no longer stream non-steam games it just shows the game with a grayed out install button instead streaming button is this bug?

Oh wow. This would be really sad. I often use the feature to stream non steam games to start a terminal on my desktop computer from my netbook to do all sorts of stuff on my desktop remotely. :-(
Nod Sep 18, 2019
I would like a way to filter games that are not linux native and also by protondb "score" without having to do manual tagging. Is this possible? As far as I can tell its not.

I would like to see more platform related filters so that I can have dynamic collections like these:

+ Proton Whitelisted
+ No Linux Version
+ Protondb Platinum
+ Protondb Gold
+ Protondb Silver
+ Protondb Bronze
+ Protondb Borked
+ AAA Titles
+ Feral Port
+ Kid Friendly

I don't want to have to manually curate these collections and keep them up to date.

Probably the closest I can get is to rely on store tags with a dynamic collection. This assumes people actually tagged games with Protondb "scores" witch I don't think they do.

The problem I see with trying to use tags for these is that all the proton* ones (and even the linux support one) can change over time so over time its likely that out of date tags will make collections based on them useless.

It would be cool if filters could integrate with third party APIs, that way the `Protondb Gold` filter could be updated by hitting the protondb API. It would also make it possible to use other useful resources like steamdb to create collections like:

+ Most Played Games
+ Trending Games


Last edited by Nod on 18 September 2019 at 10:35 pm UTC
Nod Sep 19, 2019
Well after writing the post above I have discovered how useful it is to log in to protondb with my steam account. Pretty much gives me all the proton filters I was wanting. Its not quite as good as having it in the steam client but its pretty good!
Philadelphus Sep 19, 2019
Quoting: Dunc
Quoting: Philadelphus
Quoting: DuncI had to resort to the magic SysReq key to reboot.
The what now? :O
Raising elephants is so utterly boring. :)
That's amazing, I'd never heard of that before!

Now given how infrequently my Linux machine actually freezes up that badly, I'll probably have completely forgotten it the next time I need it.
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