No, that's regression...

> ALSA broke this ability not just for OSS applications, native ALSA applications can not issue any sound if Adobe Reader hogs the device either.
It works perfectly fine if your sound card has a hardware mixer (as my Asus A7V880 did), and if it doesn't, you can use dmix.

> Exactly! They provide one version for Windows (85-90%+ market share), one version for Mac (5-10% market share) and eight versions for Linux (2-3% market share). Why? Because all these Linux versions have forsaken compatibility in the pursuit of pretty colors. And even then it does not work with all versions of Linux.
Which version of Linux does the statically linked binary not work on? And besides, this still isn't a backwards compatibility issue, but a cross-distro interoperability problem. I agree that having so many different distros sucks.

> There are hope: at least they can write "Ubuntu 10.4+ 32-bit." and are not forced to provide separate versions for Ubuntu 10.4, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10... but the fact that it's problematic to use 32bit version on 64bit Ubuntu is already quite aggravating
Yet again, this is not a backwards compatibility issue but a cross-architecture compatibility problem specific to one distro (i. e. debian and its derivatives). It's trivial on, say, Fedora.
Aside from that, it is trivial to make the 32-bit version run on a 64-bit machine: just use the statically linked version. But then, why would anybody do that, given that a 64-bit version exists? You keep mixing up different issues and whining about things that nobody cares about in the real world.

> Unless you'll run it in compatibility mode.
Do you think I'm stupid or something? I tried that of course, it just didn't help.

> Which is still possible if you install appropriate .dll files.
Err, no. I got it to start somehow, but it ran unplayably slowly and it had massive glitches in the menu and the HUD. It way unplayable.