Steam Deck’s new UI is finally coming to desktop Big Picture mode
The revamped Big Picture is available for testing right now.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
After years of incremental updates, Steam Big Picture mode is finally getting a long-awaited overhaul. Valve announced on Thursday that Big Picture mode’s new interface—the same one used on the Steam Deck—is now available for testing. “This update has been a long time coming, and we’re very excited to start gathering community feedback,“Valve wrote.
The Steam Deck launched in February with SteamOS 3, which is essentially an all-new version of the gaming-focused operating system Valve’s been working on for years. The original version of SteamOS, launched alongside the doomed living room PCSteam Machines, was built on top of a version of Linux called Debian. SteamOS 3 switched to Arch Linux, whichlet Valve iterate more quickly.
Valve’s plan has always been to carry over the user interface work it’s done for the Steam Deck to the desktop Big Picture mode, but clearly whipping the Deck into the shape has been the priority this year.
Big Picture Mode is still perfectly serviceable for living room gaming, but visually hasn’t changed much since it launched in 2012. Since using Big Picture remains the only way to access Steam’s mighty controller configurator tool, the new interface is a welcome update.
Here’s Valve’s quick overview of what’s changing:
The update is accessible to anyone who uses the Steam Client beta (Steam Settings > Account > Beta participation). To use it, though, you’ll need to create a Steam shortcut on your desktop and append -gamepadui to the target field, as in the image below.
Valve’s collecting feedback and bug reports in theSteam Big Picture discussion forum.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites likeThe WirecutterandTestedbefore joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he’ll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he’s not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it’s really becoming a problem), he’s probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
I don’t know whether I’d wait for Black Friday when there are already RTX 4070 Super gaming PCs going for so little
You can now turn your Raspberry Pi 5 into a proper retro gaming PC with official hardware as the manufacturer just released its own PCIe 3.0 SSDs
GTA 6’s corporate overlord reveals that he’s looking forward to ‘a more sensible FTC’ under the Trump administration because sometimes ‘deregulation can be a positive’
