Steam Forum

I just thought I'd note hear that newer versions of Steam crash on start with newer Linux versions of Wine when running the ALSA sound driver. This upstream bug affects the 13.1.x versions of Crossover.

A workaround is to manually set the audio driver to OSS, or to use Pulse Audio and the Pulse driver (Contrary to popular belief pulse-audio does not have to be installed systemwide. It's just that such setups are popular.) If someone wants to make a guide on how to do each of these, it would be helpful.

I may go and look it up later.
Using the OSS driver involves a Wine registry key to force-override auto-detection. However, I would need to look up what that key is.

ugh, bad post

Bad post or bad situation.

Specifically it's Wine ALSA driver not ALSA itself.

I currently don't know how to force change Crossover to use OSS compatability mode on Alsa systems, so a better option is to run Pulse. Ubuntu already runs this.

As a note, another bug prevents audio input from OSS drivers on Steam and Source-Engine games if it isn't fixed by now. However, sound output is fine and it doesn't crash. Because of the sound input bug, the OSS driver is blacklisted for Steam, but you can easily override this as well.

The better option is to run Pulse.

If you don't need sound from Steam itself you can disable mmdevapi for Steam.exe via a DLL override. This won't disable sound in the games.