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Valve released SteamOS 0.4 for Steam Frame on October 8 at 23:23 UTC, and not one of the 22 changes it lists is new. All 22 had been running on the headset’s beta channel since October 7, and one of them, the fix for Error 17, still needs a SteamVR beta on the PC. Valve’s note opens: “SteamOS 0.4 for Steam Frame has just been released for all users with the following changes:”, and unlike the five releases before it, it tells owners to opt into nothing.
SteamOS 0.4 is the first 0.4 build that reaches owners who never opted into the beta channel. Image: Valve
The release is the channel, not the changelog. Every SteamOS build Valve has pushed to the Frame since September 26 went only to owners who opted in, and this one goes to all of them.
Valve drops the opt-in wording it used five times
The five 0.4.x releases before this one each carry Beta in the title on Valve’s news feed, and each tells owners how to get it: the update “is for the Steam Frame Beta channel, and includes new features that are still being tested”, opted into through Settings, System, System Update Channel. The October 8 release is titled SteamOS 0.4 and says none of that.
The contents match the beta exactly. The 0.4.5 beta note of October 7 at 02:15 UTC marks a single line as new, the fix for the headset colour regression Valve had never announced, and files the other 21 changes under previous 0.4 releases. The 0.4.4 beta of October 5 at 23:14 UTC had 21 of the 22, missing only the colour fix. Both notes and the stable one were read at 21:36 UTC on October 10.
Error 17 still wants a beta on your PC
One line comes with a condition, and Valve writes it out in full: “VR streaming reliability improvements, including fixes for ‘Error 17.’ Note: On the PC, you must also opt into SteamVR 2.18.2 or later to reduce ‘Error 17’ connection issues. At the time of this release, SteamVR 2.18.2 is available on the SteamVR [beta] branch.”
That half has not moved. SteamVR’s stable branch is still 2.17. On Valve’s own SteamVR news feed, read at 21:36 UTC on October 10, the newest stable announcements are “Introducing SteamVR 2.17” from September 10 at 21:55 UTC and “SteamVR Hotfix 2.17.10” from September 18 at 17:28 UTC. Every 2.18 release since, up to 2.18.3 on October 10 at 00:50 UTC, is titled “SteamVR Beta Updated”, and Valve gives no date for 2.18 reaching stable.
So the Error 17 work has swapped sides. It needed a beta on the headset and a beta on the PC when Valve first shipped it on October 1, and now only the PC half is behind an opt-in.
What a default-channel Frame picks up
Battery life is the biggest of them. Valve claims “gains of up to 12%” in “power efficiency and battery lifetime during both streaming and local gameplay”, then limits the claim in the same breath: “Result vary depending on framerate and content.” The figure is Valve’s, and it has been on the beta channel since October 1.
The rest is a clean-up list. There is a presence sensor sensitivity control for owners who use glasses spacers, the colour clarity fix, a wireless adapter repair for “users in some countries” that Valve declines to name, controller bindings that had stopped loading for certain games including Google Earth VR and Thumper, spectator view smoothed by default, the on-screen keyboard appearing during streaming again, and an embedded browser update carrying Linux H.264 detection fixes.
Valve has been moving quickly on this headset. SteamOS 0.3.0 reached the stable channel on September 17 at 23:19 UTC, five 0.4.x betas followed between September 26 and October 7, and 0.4 landed 45 hours after the last of them.
The note gives no build number, no date for SteamVR 2.18 on the stable branch, and no instruction for owners who opted into the beta channel and are now running ahead of everyone else. The fixes belong to every Frame. One of them still asks for a beta at the other end of the link.
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