Valve has announced earlier today, March 25, the immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta version for its awesome SteamOS Linux operating system for gamers. SteamOS Update 157 has been pushed to the Alchemist Beta channel a few hours ago and the ISO images are now available for download.

Powered by Linux kernel 3.10.5, the new release of the SteamOS operating system updated the proprietary Nvidia video drivers to version 346.35, adds support for OEM and Alienware splash branding, as well as a missing plymouth-themes dependency in the Plymouth themes packages.

According to the release notes, SteamOS Update 157 Alchemist Beta brings a great number of updated packages, including core components, essential libraries, and utilities. So, if you’re curious to know what exactly has been changed in this release, please visit the official release announcement.

Numerous security fixes and upstream updates have been implemented

Among the security fixes and upstream updates that have been implemented in this new SteamOS Beta update, we can mention patches to Apache, BIND, cURL, Binutils, D-Bus, e2fsprogs, elfutils, Evolution Data Server, File, FreeType, GnuPG, Icu, Jasper, krb5, libarchive, and libav.

In addition, the Iceweasel web browser, Samba, libgcrypt11, libssh2, libxfont, libxml2, NTP, OpenSSL, Sudo, tzdata, unzip, and xdg-utils packages have also been updated from the upstream Debian GNU/Linux operating system on which the SteamOS Beta distribution is currently based.

Download SteamOS Update 157 Alchemist Beta right now from Softpedia. Keep in mind though, that this is an unstable version and it is not recommended to be installed on production machines where stability is a must. We strongly recommend that you download the stable SteamOS version instead, if you don’t plan on testing out the new Beta. Please note that the distribution must be installed, as there’s no Live CD available at this moment.