Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, there are two branches for SteamOS, stable and beta. The new features are included in the beta version and after enough tests are peformed, the enhancements get to the stable SteamOS version.
Among others, the Alchemist branch (Beta) got support for the AMD 14.1 Beta 1 drivers, ported from Debian Jessie, got fixes for critical APT bugs and LightDM, received support for hybrid configurations of the drivers for the main VGA output,and received new translations.
If you already have SteamOS installed and want to receive the update, install the Alchemist repository and restart the system:
$ sudo apt-get install steamos-beta-repo
$ sudo reboot
The story so far:
For those who don’t know yet, Valve, now a member of The Linux Foundation, has initiated some ambitions projects: the SteamOS, a Linux operating system optimized for gaming, the Steam Machine, a gaming colsole that will run with SteamOS and the Steam Controller, a game controller specially designed for SteamOS and the Steam Machine. A demo video of the Steam Controller can be found here.
The first Beta version of SteamOS 1.0 (which has been released in November, 2013) is a customized Debian Wheezy system, running on Kernel 3.10.11, back-porting fresh Nvidia, Catalyst and Mesa binary drivers, uses SysVinit as the system’s default event manager, a personalized GNOME 3.4 as the default desktop environment for the Big Picture mode and Xcompmgr, a lightweight graphics compositor.
While the Nvidia graphics cards were supported by default, Valve has recently patched SteamOS to officially support both Intel and AMD GPUs.