Steam's September beta adds Big Art Mode and TV control for Steam Machine
Valve's September 9 Steam client beta adds a Big Art Mode home screen, screensavers and HDMI-CEC TV switching, aimed squarely at the Steam Machine.
Valve pushed a Steam client build to the Preview/Beta channel on September 9 that rebuilds the front of the interface around the television. The update adds a Big Art Mode layout for the home screen, a Personal Calendar of upcoming releases, a set of built-in screensavers, and a controller shortcut that asks a connected TV to switch its input to the Steam Machine. None of it is on the stable channel yet: the current stable client is the September 1 build, re-released on September 6.
What the September 9 beta changes
The headline item in the September 9 beta notes is Big Art Mode, a toggle under Settings > Home that swaps the standard home layout for one dominated by the background art of whichever title is selected in the Recent Games row. Valve's own description in the client calls it "an alternate layout for the home screen that highlights background art for the selected title in Recent Games." The Recommended tab also gains a Personal Calendar, a dated strip the client labels "a personalized-for-you list of new and upcoming games".
Alongside that, Valve added screensavers, accessible from Settings > Customization. Two ship by default: a game art slideshow that can pull artwork from recently played titles and recent in-game screenshots, and a retro bouncing-logo screensaver. Custom screensavers are supported the same way custom startup movies are, dropped into ~/.steam/root/config/uioverrides/screensavers/, with the bouncing logo provided as a working example.
The living-room plumbing
The less visible entries in the changelog are the ones that matter most for a device parked under a TV. Pressing the system button on a controller now asks the television to make the Steam Machine the active source, provided the set supports HDMI-CEC. Waking from sleep on a box that several people share now raises a notification naming the current user, which can be activated to switch accounts and dismisses on any other input; if waking would kick an active session on another device, the client now offers a confirmation and a user switch rather than silently taking over.
Valve also tightened the power menu. "Exit VR" and "switch to desktop mode" now ask for confirmation, "sleep" no longer does, and any confirmation dialog that will close a running game now says so explicitly. A "Default to Desktop Mode" toggle has been added to System settings, and SteamOS compatibility dialogs now appear in desktop mode when a player installs something that is not verified for that hardware.
The rest of the build is maintenance with a compatibility slant. The compatibility tool dropdown is now always visible, with the recommended Proton build or Steam runtime pinned to the top as "Default" and aliases such as "Proton Stable" selectable directly. A bug that left Windows games marked "Not Compatible" in the library until a Proton version was chosen by hand is fixed. Download speeds on high-latency connections were improved, and Remote Play no longer demands a PIN simply to queue a download to a remote device, though installing and streaming still require one. A follow-up beta on September 10 cleaned up a crash regression in that new compatibility dropdown.
Why this points at the Steam Machine
Valve's living-room console has been on sale since June 22, 2026. The Steam Machine product page lists a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 part with six cores and twelve threads running up to 4.8 GHz at a 30 W TDP, paired with a semi-custom RDNA 3 GPU with 28 compute units at up to 2.45 GHz and a 110 W TDP, plus 16 GB of DDR5 system memory and 8 GB of GDDR6 video memory. Valve pitches it at up to 4K with FSR 4.1.
The hard facts on the hardware this update is built for:
- Released: June 22, 2026
- Steam Machine 512 GB: $1,049.00, or $1,128.00 bundled with a Steam Controller
- Steam Machine 2 TB: $1,349.00, or $1,428.00 bundled with a Steam Controller
- Operating system: SteamOS, the same build that runs on Steam Deck
“The hardware is roughly six times as powerful as a Steam Deck but the software that runs on Machine is the same as what runs on Deck, including SteamOS, the Steam interface, and Proton.”Valve, Steam Blog announcement, June 4, 2026
That software commonality is deliberate. When Valve extended the Verified programme to the new hardware on June 4, it told developers on the Steam Blog that a game already passing Steam Deck Verified would pass on Steam Machine without extra work, and that it was retesting titles that had failed Deck's performance bar on the more powerful box. Every interface change shipped to the Steam client therefore lands on the handheld and the console at once, which is why a beta full of TV-centric features also reads as a Steam Deck update.
SteamOS 3.9 is moving in parallel
The client is only half of the stack. Valve put SteamOS 3.9.0 on the Steam Deck Preview channel on August 29. It refreshes the Arch Linux base, moves Desktop Mode from KDE Plasma 6.4.3 to 6.7.3, rebases the kernel on Linux 7.2, switches new installations from iwd to wpa_supplicant for wider Wi-Fi compatibility, and adds preliminary hibernation support that is not yet exposed in the Game Mode interface. Valve also renamed a batch of steamos- scripts and packages to holo-, keeping aliases for the old names. Existing installs stay on iwd unless the new backend is enabled manually in Developer Settings.
The share numbers have not moved yet
Valve's Hardware and Software Survey for August 2026, published in early September, still shows how small the SteamOS footprint is next to Windows. Linux accounted for 3.90% of surveyed machines, down 0.11 points on the month, against 93.95% for Windows and 2.14% for macOS. Windows 11 64-bit alone held 70.97%. Within the Linux slice, SteamOS Holo was the single most common distribution at 0.82%, itself down 0.07 points, ahead of CachyOS at 0.60% and Arch at 0.34%.
In other words, three months of Steam Machine sales have not yet produced a visible bump in Valve's own operating system share, and the September client beta is not going to change that by itself. What it does show is where the development effort is going: the Steam interface is being reshaped for a screen you sit six feet away from, with the account switching, input negotiation and compatibility messaging that a shared living-room device needs. Those features have to clear the beta channel before the people who bought a Steam Machine in June actually get them, and Valve has not said when that will be.
Anyone who wants the new home screen now has to opt into the client Preview or Beta channel from Settings > Interface, with the usual caveat that the September 9 build was patched the following day. The September 1 stable client remains the safe option, and it is no slouch: it added HDR streaming to Steam Deck OLED over Remote Play, AV1 video streaming on the experimental SteamRT3 client, and flagging of suspicious content in group chats.
Welcome to the fam, ya'll! -Steam Controller -Steam Machine -Steam Frame (Growing our @Steam Hardware Family in early 2026)
— Steam Deck (@OnDeck), 12 November 2025 on X
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Theo covers the business of games for Gamers6: studio moves, platform strategy and the press releases nobody else finishes reading. He files most days before the coffee is cold.
