Steam for Linux Just Went 64-bit, and Valve Answered Epic's Speed Claim in Under a Day

Valve shipped one of its most consequential Steam Client betas in years on October 15, and buried in the patch notes is a line that ends an era: "The Steam client is now a 64bit application." After more than a decade of running as a 32-bit program on Linux, Steam has finally made the jump. It arrives alongside a containerized runtime, a new Achievement Sets system for developers, and what looks very much like a same-week answer to Epic Games' claim that its new launcher is faster than Steam.

It is tempting to file this under routine client maintenance. That would be a mistake. This beta touches three of the most important fault lines in PC gaming right now: Linux as a first-class platform, the escalating launcher wars, and the design of the systems that record what players accomplish.

The headline: a 64-bit Steam for Linux

The Linux changes are the ones that will matter longest. The Steam client now runs as a 64-bit application on Linux, and it runs inside a Steam Runtime container, the same container technology Valve already uses to give games a predictable environment across distributions. In practice, that means fewer of the library-version headaches that have made Linux support a distro-by-distro guessing game. Whether a player is on Fedora, Ubuntu, or anything else, Steam should now behave the same way.

To be clear about what this is not: Valve made no performance claims, published no benchmarks, and the change does not turn existing 32-bit games into 64-bit software. Keep your compatibility packages installed. What it is, instead, is infrastructure. Valve is future-proofing the client on the platform where its hardware bets, the Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine, live or die.

This is not about frame rates. It is Valve future-proofing the client on the platform where its hardware bets live or die.

The beta also fixes a smaller but genuinely annoying Linux bug, the updater interface that sometimes failed to appear at all, plus memory leaks in game streaming and controller code, and crashes affecting small numbers of users.

The speed race: Valve answers Epic in under 24 hours

The timing of the second story is hard to ignore. Epic Games released a new launcher claiming it starts 46 percent faster than Steam, a headline Epic confirmed was coming when it said in June that it was building a faster launcher. Within a day of that launch, Valve shipped a Steam Client update whose release notes included the dryly worded line "improved Steam Client startup times."

Early testers claim the new Steam boots marginally faster than Epic's new launcher. One user on X reported their Steam client starting in 5.23 seconds, faster than the launch times Epic published. Both sides' numbers deserve skepticism: Epic's figure was averaged across 13 Windows PCs, the 5.23-second report came from one user's machine, and Valve has said nothing about how much faster Steam actually got. More rigorous testing is needed before anyone can declare a winner.

But the exact winner matters less than the pattern. For years, the launcher wars were fought with exclusive titles and free game giveaways. This round is being fought with milliseconds. Steam's startup time, of all things, is now a competitive feature, and Valve is treating it like one.

Achievement Sets: developers get the keys

The third change is aimed at developers. Steam Achievement Sets let studios group a game's achievements into named collections, so a base game's achievements, DLC achievements, and seasonal or time-limited challenges stop living in one undifferentiated list. Each set gets its own progress bar, and finishing every achievement in a set awards a "set complete" trophy on the player's profile.

The details show Valve thought carefully about the annoyance it was solving. If a developer adds new achievements to a set later, the player's earlier completion is preserved. Studios can archive individual achievements or whole sets, so time-limited or seasonal content stops polluting other players' completion totals, while unlocked items stay visible to the people who earned them. Portal 2, for example, splits its achievements between single-player and co-op. The whole achievements page has been redesigned to consolidate overall progress, per-set progress, and individual achievement details.

For a platform where games live for a decade and DLC keeps moving the finish line, this is overdue housekeeping. Completionists have long had the perverse experience of finishing a game, then watching a later update un-finish it.

What this beta really signals

Step back and the October 15 beta reads like a statement of priorities. Valve is investing in client engineering, Linux infrastructure, and developer tools at the same time, which is exactly what you would expect from a company whose moat is the platform itself rather than any single game. Epic came at that moat with a speed benchmark, and Valve answered with a patch.

There is a longer arc here too. Valve's Linux commitment started as a hedge against Windows platform risk, became the foundation of the Steam Deck through Proton, and now shows up in the runtime architecture of the client itself. The container move is the kind of unglamorous plumbing that makes platforms durable. Nobody will buy a Steam Deck because the client is 64-bit. But every Linux user who stops hitting a distro-specific bug is a user who stays, and platforms are won in the aggregate, one retained user at a time.

The beta is still just a beta. Wider rollout depends on how the testing goes, and Valve's own release notes are characteristically sparse about what comes next. But if this is the direction, the next phase of the launcher wars will be decided less by who has the better exclusives and more by whose client boots faster, crashes less, and works on every machine without a second thought.