The client update for Valve Software's gaming service delivers improvements for folks with recent versions of Windows, Linux, and macOS, but for users

Steam cuts the cord for legacy Windows and macOS

submited by

Style Pass

2024-11-21 18:30:06

The client update for Valve Software's gaming service delivers improvements for folks with recent versions of Windows, Linux, and macOS, but for users of older OSes, it's bad news.

The November 2024 Steam update delivers a mixture of wins and losses, depending on what you're running. There are the usual updates to the Chromium browser engine and lots of bug fixes. After quite a while in beta testing, Steam now has a built-in Game Recording feature, which allows players to save sessions and share clips with friends.

Native Linux games now run in the built-in runtime environment codenamed "Scout." Although Scout is labeled version 1.0, this replaces the older "legacy" Linux client. Native Linux titles run using Scout on SteamOS on the Steam Deck, so this change should improve compatibility on more conventional distros. It can also automatically drop back down to using X11 even if SDL is configured to use Wayland with the SDL_VIDEODRIVER setting.

From the start of 2024, Valve officially dropped support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1, as well as for macOS 10.13 High Sierra and 10.14 Mojave. The Register reported on the change at the end of 2023, as well as an informed guess as to why: because the underlying Chromium engine was dropping support for these elderly client OSes.