SteamOS355Update

What a way to end such a tremendous day. Valve has officially released SteamOS 3.5 into the stable branch with its newest update, 3.5.5. This brings an insane amount of changes that I would probably deem quite necessary. To start, we now have sliders to adjust the color vibrancy and temperature, mocking deeper colors on LCD displays and giving it a wider-gamut feel. This is great for those who don't plan to upgrade to the OLED Steam Deck and still want some new colors.

HDR and analysis has been enabled to use with external displays that support it and VRR support has been added for external displays and the Steam Deck Dock. There was also general support for the Steam Deck OLED, external storage devices can be auto-mounted, graphics drivers are now updated, and sleep resume speed has been updated. We also have new voltage offset settings to undervolt your Steam Deck and an updated Arch Linux base for better SteamOS performance and updates for KDE Plasma (Desktop Mode).

Overall, this update is MASSIVE and it is extremely exciting to see it releasing now! If you want better colors, or are playing Starfield, this will be the OS you want to be on.

SteamOS 3.5.5 Update Changelog:

Display

  • Added Settings -> Adjust Display Colors, to tune the display's Color Vibrancy and Color Temperature. The settings can be tuned with a preview of a test image (above), or with your running game.
    • Native: The native display color appearance (the color rendering for Steam Deck prior to this update).
    • sRGB: Emulate the sRGB primaries, in a smooth manner that does not introduce gradient clipping.
    • Boosted: Emulate a wider-gamut display appearance, resulting in increased apparent vibrance. May result in gradient clipping.
  • HDR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the external display.
  • Added HDR Analysis to Advanced Display settings.
  • VRR can now be enabled in Display Settings if supported by the USB-C adapter.
  • Reworked Quick-Access scaling settings to separate scaling from filtering. Added Stretch and Zoom scaling as new options to handle different aspect ratios.
  • Fixed a long-standing issue where the internal display backlight would always stay on.
  • Fixed touchscreen orientation while external display is connected.
  • Compositing is now avoided in additional scenarios, reducing latency and stutter in situation with multiple overlays on screen.
  • Improved latency in certain situations where the application renders slower than the display's refresh rate.

General

  • Added support for Steam Deck OLED.
  • Fixed an issue where certain workloads would exhibit severe CPU performance issues unless SMT was manually disabled.
  • External storage devices are now auto-mounted when connected to Steam Deck. To format or manage storage devices use the new device management interface in Settings->Storage.
  • Updated graphics drivers, with many performance and functionality improvements. Improved performance for Starfield. Fixed viewmodel corruption in Amnesia: The Bunker and launch failures for Immortals of Aveum and Kaiju-A-GoGo.
  • Improved Bluetooth connection stability, especially with multiple controllers
  • Slightly improved sleep resume speed
  • Implemented switching between controller bindings and mouse/keyboard desktop bindings by long-pressing Options in the Linux hid-steam driver, to match Steam's default Desktop configuration.
  • Improved fade transitions between applications.
  • The contents of the performance overlay can now be customized by creating a ~/.config/MangoHud/presets.conf configuration file.
  • Fixed a bug where some games could appear stretched if their window size didn't match their swapchain size (eg. Naruto Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Storm 4)
  • Fixed Disgaea PC needing to be tapped on before input works
  • Fixed physical dimensions reported to games, fixing some issues with an incorrect aspect ratio sometimes being detected (eg. Returnal)
  • Worked around a problem where Allow Tearing could cause heavy stuttering if the Performance Overlay or other overlays appeared on screen. Tearing is now impossible in such situations, and the Performance Overlay should be disabled for best results.
  • Fixed a problem where keyboard input would not be detected in Overwatch 2
  • Controller firmware: fixed an issue where some thumbstick touch sensors would lose touch periodically

Firmware 118

  • Added voltage offset settings.

Steam Deck Dock Firmware 121

  • Added VRR support.
  • Improves reliability when changing display modes via on-screen menus
  • Fixed issues with 6bpc color modes, improving high resolution/refresh mode support
  • Improves detection of HDMI cable hot-plug events

Updated Arch Linux base

  • This update pulls in newer performance, security and stability fixes for the underlying packages that are the foundation for SteamOS
  • Most notably, this includes recent changes to KDE Plasma, Steam Deck's Desktop Mode. Full notes on these updates can be found on KDE's website here. Here are a few of the highlights:
    • New window tiling system
    • Updated Discover (app store / software manager) with a new homepage and improved search
    • Discover can now perform system updates from the desktop
    • Updated desktop widgets

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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