Steam beta fixes 2015 Steam Controller pairing and dual trackpad typing drops on Steam Deck

Valve's 5 October Steam client beta fixes a download crash on older CPUs, desktop shortcuts ignoring launch options and trackpad typing, days after a beta cured Steam Controller Bluetooth drops on...

AI-drafted from 5 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Valve shipped a Steam client beta on the evening of 5 October, Pacific time, that clears up a handful of long-running Steam Deck annoyances. The release notes are short; the fixes are not small.

The one most people will feel is typing. The Deck's on-screen keyboard, driven by both trackpads at once, would sometimes drop presses, and the diacritic pop-up (hold a key for é, ü and the like) did not respond properly to trackpad input. Both are fixed. Desktop shortcuts, which had been ignoring whatever launch option you saved and starting the default one, now respect your choice.

Under general fixes there is also a crash. On older CPUs, starting a download for a game with many identical files could hang or kill the client. Valve does not say which CPUs, but the Deck's own Zen 2 chip is not old, so this will mostly matter to people running Steam on hand-me-down desktops and older handhelds.

Steam Input and the 2015 controller

The controller configurator gets two changes aimed at the same bug, a blank page. When no configuration file could be loaded from disk, the configurator now shows a landing page and lets you pick a new layout instead of showing nothing. When cloud sync is the hold-up, it now shows the sync status and lets you skip past it. Valve says these were the two common causes of the empty screen.

Pairing the original 2015 Steam Controller is fixed, which matters because SteamOS 3.8.28 only last month added the ability to wake the Deck from that controller's wireless adapter. Switch controllers get their proper button glyphs in Heavy Rain. In Remote Play, the bitrate adjustment in the network health dialog "behaves more intuitively", which is Valve's way of saying it used to do something odd.

The 1 October beta

This follows a 1 October beta that was heavier on Remote Play and the new Steam Controller. Its firmware update fixed Bluetooth Low Energy connections that "could disconnect repeatedly, especially on Steam Deck", cut the time the controller takes to fully connect, and fixed pairing through the puck. Pyrowave, the streaming codec Valve adopted this year, got a better automatic bitrate, a fix for latency that crept up on slow links, fewer audio dropouts, a recovery dialog for when the network cannot keep up, and a manual ceiling of 1 Gbit/s for people streaming over a wire. GamingOnLinux has the full list, and its 5 October write-up covers how to opt in, under Settings, then Interface.

SteamOS 3.9 is in preview too

Separately, the SteamOS 3.9.2 beta from 25 September carries early brightness control for the Legion Go 2, a workaround for a firmware bug on some Asus devices that spun the fan up after sleep, a fix for Elden Ring and Dark Souls III refusing to run on Intel's Panther Lake chips, and a batch of Steam Machine fixes, including Remote Play not working when the box boots without a display attached. It is opt-in under Settings, System, System Update Channel.

If you only run stable, none of this reaches you yet. Beta fixes usually land in the stable client within a couple of weeks, and the typing and shortcut fixes are the kind that tend to go straight through.

Sources

Image: Valve

More news from Gaming World