The UI overhaul is now stable.
I like the changes generally but they’re not that big. It’s an evolution rather than a revolution, and thats the right approach.
However I do find the Controller set up tool (for mapping buttons etc) to be trash now. The older version was far far better.
I love the new overlay UI while in game. The menus are smaller and take up less screen space so you don’t have the annoying problem of UI elements overlapping each other, unless it’s by user intent. When steam needs to open a chromium browser in the overlay, now there’s properly a tab feature and URL bar, which is HUGE when you’re trying to browse discussions or guides. The design and gray nature means it’s not difficult to read and is in line with the library UI update which has cleanly smoothed out the feeling of disconnect these past few months. Overall, props to the UI/UX people working behind this update, it looks great and functions even better!
Looks great and they managed to fix fractional scaling to your monitor (wouldn’t work forever on linux mint), was annoying squinting at tiny text.
I just wish it had a light mode.
There are a few settings you can set, to make it more light. I use it, because my computer is a bit old now. Open Steam Settings > Library and tick ON “Low Bandwidth Mode”, “Low Performance Mode”, “Disable Community Content” and disable “Show game icons in the left column”.
Depending on your system, either enable or disable the setting at Steam Settings > Interface > “Enable GPU accelerated renderin in web views” and “Enable hardware video decoding, if supported”.
These tweaks should help with an older system. And Steam has a very small mode too. In the main user interface menu at top, click View > Small Mode.
They might have meant light as opposed to dark, not “lite.”
Oh you are right, that makes totally sense. I was so focused on the performance side. In the past Steam allowed for custom skins, but they never looked great in my opinion or functioned well. If the UI is flexible enough, hopefully the custom skins will make a return. I would like to build my own custom client based on the official client.
JSYK for if you want extra performance: Steam also has a hidden “mini mode”, which you can run by adding this as a launchoption to a steam shortcut (or in a terminal)
steam://open/minigameslist.Additionally, you can add the
-no-browserlaunch option to completely disable the built-in webbrowser.I can’t find any official documentation about these options, but they are certainly there!
@Boabab Thanks for the suggestions! I am well aware of these options for years (but appreciate the suggestions nonetheless): https://gist.github.com/davispuh/6600880
The Mini mode is very limited and won’t stay mini and switches back to normal when doing anything else than starting a game. no browser mode will also break a lot of functionality of Steam. So these options aren’t what I am looking for (have tried them in the past). But overall I am fine with it at the moment. Just mentioned above suggestions to reduce some load for older systems, without losing functionality.
I wish the UI itself would be open source, that connects to the proprietary Steam service. That would be acceptable. It would allow us to write any user interface we need or want (like 100% CLI only ui, I don’t mean just starting a game with a shortcut, I would love that).
You’re welcome! And I agree, a ligtweight Open Source front end would be amazing! I know there is a CLI version of Steam (SteamCMD), but I’m not sure how much of the regular Steam functionality is built into that
Unfortunately, as good as it sounds first, SteamCMD is not what we are looking for. It is just for dedicated servers that use a special Steam API/service. Its needed to install some server applications for those games I think, for developers guess (not sure). Don’t completely understand either… But not something we need or can use for regular gaming.
