By Valve has rolled out a new Steam Deck Client update to the Stable channel, bringing a mix of quality of life changes, fixes, and some deeper Steam Input improvements.
One of the more noticeable changes is to the Power menu. When selecting Sleep, Steam Deck will now prompt you to enable display off downloads when it makes sense, which should make background downloads more obvious and easier to manage.
A few long standing annoyances have also been addressed. In game purchases that were intermittently failing for some players have been fixed, and news items should now update correctly again in the What’s New tab on the Home screen. Valve has also fixed the issue where non Steam browser windows could sometimes appear when steamwebhelper restarted.
Controller support sees a useful tweak too. If you try to pair an Xbox controller with older firmware that doesn’t work properly with Steam Deck, the system will now warn you and explain how to update the controller using the Xbox Accessories app on Windows.
There are some nice accessibility improvements as well. The Screen Reader’s Stop Talking button has been moved to X, which means external controllers can still open the Quick Access Menu using the Guide button and A equivalent.
Friends and Chat now allow suspicious or harassing group chat messages to be reported directly from the chat window, with options to block or unfriend users at the same time.
Steam Input gets the biggest set of changes in this update. Newer gyro modes have been promoted from beta to default, with more control over activation buttons, relative roll and pitch behaviour, haptics, and input inversion. There are also fixes for incorrect configs on controllers like DualSense Edge, Xbox Elite, and Joy Cons, along with several gyro related bug fixes.
Overall, this is a solid stable update focused on polish rather than flashy features, but it includes plenty of small improvements that should make daily Steam Deck use feel smoother.