The game (1.5.0) crashes while loading the initial menu w/o libpulse available. Replacing libAkSound.so with one from a different game gets past the crash, but everything else (even non-sound-related stuff, like displayed text, UI operation, and character creation; you basically can't start the game) behaves very badly, and of course there is also no sound.

If you know how to force libAkSound.so to use ALSA, that would be nice (maybe some env var or something like that?). In the mean time, apulse seems to work.

I suppose this might be fixed with v1.5.3, but of course gog doesn't have Linux 1.5.3 (or DLC 2) (yet). Maybe I should wait until the DLC and update are officially announced before complaining about that, though.

edit: The DLC2 page officially says "Linux version coming soon", whatever "soon" means, so I guess there's no point complaining about the lack of 1.5.3 and DLC2.

edit 2: Now that DLC2/1.5.3 is out, I can confirm it's still broken.

edit 3: One final note: the reason I found out libpulse/libAKSound.so was the culprit was that the logos were silent, so I thought there was an audio issue and attacked the problem from there (the crash backtrace was no help). Now that I figured it out, I see that the logos are still silent, so that wasn't an indicator of what was causing the crash at all. Lucky, but wrongly reasoned, guess, in other words. The reason I believe there is a way to make libAkSound.so use ALSA instead is that "strings" shows a block of libpulse-related strings followed by a block of libasound-related strings. Maybe I can force ALSA by returning an error code from the first libpulse function it calls, but using apulse seems adequate.

For 1.3.2 the trick that worked for me was to add libSDL2-2.0.so, which if I recall correctly is not explicitly referenced in the log, but it is somewhat related to libAkSound.so (and have not updated my game since I finished my first playthrough).

Maybe it still works.

I am waiting for 1.5.3 (which is live since about 1 week on steam) and the 2 DLC (I think the second one is likely to need 1.5.3) as well, but I would not dare to hope that the issues for linux have been solved.

I still find puzzling why gog users are often treated as second rate gamers, and the subset of linux user third rate gamers.