Today, July 3, 2016, Valve's engineers have pushed a new build of the SteamOS 2.0 gaming operating system to the brewmaster_beta channel, patching a few issues reported by users since SteamOS 2.83 Beta.
SteamOS 2.84 Beta is here only five days from the release of SteamOS 2.83 Beta, which was based on the latest stable Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 "Jessie" repositories and introduced the AMD Radeon AMD GPU-PRO RC2 and the latest long-lived Nvidia 367.27 graphics drivers with support for the Vulkan API.
When SteamOS 2.83 Beta was announced, users immediately reported "black screen" issues after booting the ISO images on systems that have Nvidia graphics cards. Therefore, today's SteamOS 2.84 Beta release updates a few packages to fix that issue reported by users, despite the fact that Valve's engineers couldn't reproduce the bug.
"This is a special edition holiday weekend update. This should fix the problem with the black screen after boot on nvidia machines. There were some other black screens reported that I have not been able to reproduce, so please report here if you are still seeing problems," reads today's announcement.
SteamOS will now select the right GLX driver before building initramfs
In their attempt to fix the "black screen" issue with Nvidia GPUs, the SteamOS developers have updated the steamos-base-files, glx-alternatives, amdgpu-pro-installer, and nvidia-graphics-drivers packages with an extra trigger step that would select the right GLX driver before building initramfs.
If you were one of those who encountered and reported the "black screen" issue, you're urged to download the new SteamOS 2.84 Beta ISO image and take it for a test drive to see if the bug has been fixed or not. Either way, don't forget to send feedback to the SteamOS devs on the announcement page.
