14 DAY TRIAL // Yes, there's yet another Steam Beta Client available for those who live on the bleeding-edge and have switched to the Beta channel of Valve's acclaimed gaming distribution platform.
The February 23 release of the Steam Beta Client was, in fact, announced today, February 24, and according to the release notes, it updates the ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) sound server in the Steam Runtime to support the most modern of GNU/Linux operating systems.
As usual, the Steam Controller received more improvements, and among them we can mention the addition of an experimental Rumble Emulation function, which has been implemented as an Application Setting that promises to offer users a feel comparable to the one created by the rumble motors.
"This feature tries to emulate a feel similar to rumble despite haptic actuators being a very different technology than rumble motors. (Requires Firmware Update). Note: if your battery level is very low, heavy haptic actuation can result in your controller spuriously shutting itself off," Valve devs explained.
Moreover, the haptics intensity has been fixed for Steam Controller, which users reported being stuck to 'High' when using the anti-deadzone feature, and it is now possible to disable all the joystick hardware deadzoning when configuring any anti-deadzone, which might cause drift if it's too large or when not using a proper buffer.
Last but not least, the Big Picture mode gets fixes for an issue with the Web Browser context menu not being positioned where it would have to be on various screen sizes, and an issue with the overlay, which users reported being unresponsive when restarting games straight after exiting it. A "Store Page" link will now appear on your game library entries, in the "Manage Game" section.