If you're having issues with audio in CS 2 add this argument

If you are using pipewire add -sdlaudiodriver pipewire to your CS 2 launch options.

For those using gamemoderun it would look like this: gamemoderun %command% -sdlaudiodriver pipewire

5 comments

You should also be able to set the SDL_AUDIODRIVER environment variable to pipewire to get this effect globally.

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL2/FAQUsingSDL
- Oh, dope, thanks! I hope this doesn't fuck up anything that's hardcoded to expect Pulse or something, but I guess I'll find out.
For flatpak steam, you need to run this:

flatpak override --user --filesystem=/run/user/1000/pipewire-0 com.valvesoftware.Steam

Then -sdlaudiodriver pipewire launch option will work.
This is happening with dota 2 as well, probably it was messed up on the engine level.
Yeah, seems like it is preferring the ALSA backend. Sound initially worked for me because I had pipewire-alsa installed, but I couldn't do anything to change the volume.