Valve is pleased to announce the preview of the next SteamOS release, codenamed "brewmaster" and based on the latest Debian 8.1 stable release.

Please note that this is a very early preview release and we have done only limited hardware compatibility and functional testing. We are releasing this early to get feedback from the community. You should not install brewmaster on any machine containing data you are not prepared to lose completely.

Although there are a lot of changes under the covers, the overall functionality and experience of brewmaster is the same as alchemist and most of the SteamOS FAQ applies to both releases.


Q. Where can I download the brewmaster installer?
A. ISO (for legacy systems) ZIP (for UEFI systems)

Q. How do I install brewmaster?
A. See "How do I install SteamOS?" in the SteamOS FAQ. The process is the same for both brewmaster and alchemist releases.

Q. How do I upgrade alchemist to brewmaster?
A. Upgrade is not supported. You will need to completely reinstall.

Q. How does this affect my existing SteamOS alchemist installation?
A. There is no change to alchemist support yet. For now, we will continue updating alchemist with the relevant security updates and Steam will continue to support alchemist. At some point we will drop support for alchemist and only support brewmaster.

Q. What version of the Linux kernel does brewmaster use?
A. The brewmaster kernel is based on the 3.18 LTS kernel with additional SteamOS patches. The kernel sources can be found in the steamos_kernel[github.com] repository.

Q. How do I give feedback or report bugs in brewmaster?
A. Please post on the SteamOS Discussion Forum, or file an issue in the SteamOS issue tracker[github.com].

Q. What kind of issues should I report?
A. We are especially interested in any regressions in hardware compatibility or Steam games. If it worked in alchemist and doesn't work in brewmaster, let us know!