I have read about so many issues regarding Bluetooth and Linux its ridiculous. Usually its random disconnecting, not auto reconnecting, not disconnecting properly, basically every issue possible. And ive had them too. I would really love it if i could just have my ps4 controller hook up right when I turn it on for example. Or have my shared speaker system actually disconnect when I turn off blnluetooth (it doesnt).
I’ve mostly only used mint with Bluetooth. Some popos but it had the same issues ofc. Only really used desktops, but also have issues on an atari vcs with mint and Bluetooth, exact same issues my desktop has.
Anyone know some real fixes? This is one of those things that makes it very hard to get people to switch when windows handles bluetooth devices perfectly (in my experience) and linux has just sucked so bad on that front.
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Huh, I didn’t realize Bluetooth was still such a problem for some people. I’ve been using Ubuntu and cheap chinese Bluetooth earbuds with a Intel wireless/Bluetooth chip, and they’ve been fine. Haven’t really had many disconnect or connection issues.
Now the 10 year old integrated nvidia gpu on my alienware steam machine, on the other hand… Sleep just broke again when I did an apt upgrade yesterday, time to diagnose that, again. On 24.04 LTS if anyone was interested.
I’ve had a smoother time with Bluetooth since switching to Linux than I did on Windows.
On Windows it would randomly disconnect, or I would need to manually forget and re-pair the device every few months. Now when I turn on the device, it reliably reconnects to either my phone or the Linux device, depending on which one it was connected to last.
Maybe it’s distro / device dependent
Yeah I think a lot of people have crummy Bluetooth devices and Bluetooth is kind of a Dark Art in itself regardless of operating system but anytime something goes wrong that would have been the same way on Windows they just blame Linux because it’s new and they’re not used to it.
Lucky, it used to be Bluetooth wouldn’t work unless I shutoff my computer and turned it back on. I just stopped using it.
What’s funny is that all those same Bluetooth issues are also still very common on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android…
I have had issues on android. I cant recall having many windows bluetooth issues but I haven’t used windows for a while
That’s the best way to use windows.
BT is a minor pain on Windows, but I’ve never heard of such complaints as I hear from the Linux community.
That’s mostly because people in the Linux Community actually talk about it, as opposed to Windows users who just buy new devices.
Mostly depends on your blurtooth card. If the one on your mobo isn’t behaving, grab a $10 generic usb one off amazon that claims it works with linux. Mine’s been solid for years, it’s what I had to do.
But how you FIX it is you dig into the code and fix it so everyone else with your card gets the positive experience.
Distro makes a difference , or rather the packages installed that come with the distro. My Bluetooth worked great for my devices, until I tried my 20 year old BT mouse and it would fail to reconnect after boot. But it was fixed by changine or adding other Bluetooth packages. I forget which right now but something like bluewave vs blueman or somthing, then it was fine.
Bluez for the bluetooth stack and blueman for the frontend manager
Personally I solved it by plugging in a wired headphone in my laptop. Fuck Bluetooth, it’s never worked in a stable fashion for me these past 25 years or so, no matter what devices or OS I use. 3.5mm jack and USB remain the superior choices.
I had tonnes of problems when I used Mint which went away when I switched to Arch. I switched from Arch to EndeavourOS and didn’t get the problems coming back. I think EndeavourOS is about on par with Mint in terms of difficulty and set up time, but seems more stable and capable. I use KDE and the associated Bluetooth management stack and it works well.
That said, in the rare case I do have an issue I just restart Bluetooth through systemctl and it starts working again. The most recent time I had this was when I had my left earbud working on my phone and my right on my computer. It worked fine until I stepped away for a second, it dropped from my phone but not my computer, but then the left earbud tried to join up with the right connecting to the PC and everything broke. A quick restart of Bluetooth and boom, all good.
Been using Bazzite for over a year now and Bluetooth has always just worked.
I wish I knew.
I have two Linux systems: a laptop with Fedora and home media PC with Ubuntu. Bluetooth works great on the laptop, no issues whatsoever.
Completely different story with the media PC. I’ve never been able to get it working properly, and I’ve spent hours googling things to throw into the terminal hoping to get it fixed. I’m no IT guy but I know the basics, and it’s not an old PC or anything (Asus NUC 14 Pro I think), but I can’t get the stupid thing to stay connected with my Xbox controllers for the life of me. My wife wants to play games god damnit!
My Windows box, while rife with other problems (even though I’m on 10 LTSC) also never has Bluetooth issues, and it isn’t the first time I’ve had said problems with Linux distros (had Mint installed on a box at one point but I managed to fix the issue by changing drivers). There must be a better way!
if your BT is connected via USB (
lsusb), there’s a buncha kernel switches that prevent it from suspending. since it’s a stationary device that’s often not needed, so disabling USB and BT autosuspend goes a long way to make them things behave.It’s integral to the motherboard, but that does make sense otherwise.
those are still connected via USB internally most of the times, type
lsusband if it’s there, same thing applies.
Hopefully it gets done in a shorter time than Wayland took.
I’ve been using Pop!_OS as my main system (Lenovo X1 Extreme) since just before the COVID lockdown and I’ve never had an issue with my Bluetooth devices.
I am going to guess that maybe the issue is that some computers use a Bluetooth device that has less than optimal Linux support. Maybe the way to address the issue is by having a more detailed hardware support list so that consumers can choose the hardware that is the most stable with Linux.
My desktop just has a cheap dongle.
The crazy thing, the atari vcs has its own debian based atari os and the bluetooth on it works perfectly. But when running mint on the same machine, I get disconnect issues. I want to figure out how atari got it to be so solid
I had problems on an old laptop, installed bluez and it fixed it (though I still had to connect my airpods via terminal for the first time, then they worked.) Haven’t tried on my new one actually because I really don’t use bluetooth that often on pc.
