Valves Roll Out Big Steam Update With UI Refresh, Redesigned In-Game Overlay & Notes

[clementhk]

I recently started testing out Tauri the packaged size is 6 MB compare to 188 MB, and the memory usage has dropped from over 800 MB to 60 MB. Move to Tauri if you're already using a UI frameworks.

[JellyBrain]

Looks like the UI no longer hangs under Wayland, when both the main window and a chat window are open at the same time. So glad that's finally fixed!
It also feels a lot snappier overall.

Which GPU do you have?

[verres]

For me new in the client, UI font is very small and hard to read (4K monitor). In old client it scaled nicely.

[StarterX4]

is it directly working on Wayland or still Xwayland ?

Still XWayland. Yet even still Gtk2.

[skeevy420]

For me new in the client, UI font is very small and hard to read (4K monitor). In old client it scaled nicely.

Same here on KDE Wayland. I had to add "-forcedesktopscaling float" to Steam's launch parameters to scale the UI to something I could read; float is any floating number.

Technically speaking, I used "-forcedesktopscaling int" because I only needed 2x scaling.

[kiffmet]

skeevy420 When you do that, the Steam client will get resized by that factor every time you open it with that shortcut, despite already running in the background. I was wondering why my client got more and more ridiculously large, until I noticed that I still have that parameter in my .desktop file.

If you want the new client to pick up the correct scaling, you either need your font DPI setting to match your monitor or have "org.gnome.desktop.interface" in gsettings/dconf-editor set to the right factor; it's one of those two, plus the "scaling setting" in the Steam options.

[skeevy420]

skeevy420 When you do that, the Steam client will get resized by that factor every time you open it with that shortcut, despite already running in the background. I was wondering why my client got more and more ridiculously large, until I noticed that I still have that parameter in my .desktop file.

If you want the new client to pick up the correct scaling, you either need your font DPI setting to match your monitor or have "org.gnome.desktop.interface" in gsettings/dconf-editor set to the right factor; it's one of those two.

Huh. That's good to know. I'm launching via terminal and system tray so I'd never come across that issue

OK, so I played with some KDE settings and, on the Display Configuration page, I changed Legacy Applications from "Apply scaling themselves" to "Scaled by the system" and that sort of worked. While it scaled everything the 200% I have set, it was horribly scaled and elements were were blurry and ugly. They were so much more crisp and beautiful with the "Apply scaling themselves" and forcing the scaling level from the command line.

I've never changed my font sizes or DPI settings. Everything is (supposed to be) scaled to 200% via the Display Configuration scaling slider.

After doing all of that I installed dconf-editor, manually set window and font scaling to 2 (0 and 1 by default), rebooted, and it still didn't scale.

Edit: And in case anyone else is reading this and has the same issue, the very first thing I did was to turn off Steam's built-in scaling option, restart Steam, reenable the option, and restarted Steam again. That didn't work either.

[Amaranth]

I recently started testing out Tauri the packaged size is 6 MB compare to 188 MB, and the memory usage has dropped from over 800 MB to 60 MB. Move to Tauri if you're already using a UI frameworks.

That depends on the libwebkit2gtk installed on the system though, doesn't it? Steam is entirely self-contained so they would at the very least have to ship their own copy of that (and gtk, etc).

[schmidtbag]

I'm not against a web-based interface, but I would much rather just navigate Steam through my browser than let it use its own integrated one, and then have a basic launcher+runtime installed on my system that is nothing more than a system tray icon, used to communicate what's locally installed and operating.

[L_A_G]

The old UI was always a bit of a hodgepodge of things strung together to implement functionality well beyond what the older parts were designed to support. Needing to be heavily cross-platform obviously didn't help so unifying everything under a single web app was probably the best solution. Obviously you're going to get the usual complaints about it being too heavy to run under a 386 and 16 MB or RAM, but I'd have to go back to my old Pentium 4 machine before the new version's resource usage becomes a serious problem.