Freeze on Linux, repro 100%

[cbob3000]

My SOMA consistently freezes near the place where I'm supposed to launch a shuttle to the second station. It's the spot where there's an still-alive lady lying on the floor and tentacles coming from a box attached to her. Sometimes the game freezes by just getting the box and/or the lady into the field of view, sometimes a second later when I try to unplug the wires from the box. By freeze I mean a condition where a static image remains on my screen but audio gets killed and absolutely nothing moves or reacts to any input. Only way out of this is to kill -9 the game from the command line. I'm on a relatively powerful intel i5 with SSD disk and 16 gigs of memory. My GPU is Nvidia 660, latest official ubuntu drivers installed. Distro Xubuntu 14.04.3 LTS, upgraded. Help?