Windows 8 being unusable on my shitty laptop I had back then, IIRC it would bluescreen 9 out of 10 times on startup (this same bug still persisted when eventually Windows 10 came out). I essentially switched to Linux full time after that.
I had a lot of problems back when I lived in civilization. But now that I live out of range of cell signals, and can’t even see neighbors’ wifi networks, it works a whole hell of a lot better. I still use a traditional DECT (Logitech H820e), and also a dongled 2.4ghz (Audeze Maxwell) headsets for work, but I also use the Maxwell with my phone over bluetooth without a problem. My Sennheiser Momentum 4 work fine with both my phone running Graphene, and my Thinkpad running Fedora.
I won’t even try with Windows. The bluetooth stack is such trash.
Sometime HSP just stopped working so now I have to do calls with my laptop built-in mic.
Also, some programs like Zoom just fail to use the right output device no matter what I choose in settings. I just have to make headphones the fallback device for anything to work.
But the most annoying thing is Linux somehow stealing the playback when my headphones are connected to multiple devices. Even when nothing plays on the computer but does play on the phone, there’s no audio. I have to disable/disconnect my computer to use headphones with phone when my computer is in range.
I remember under pulse I would have issues of programs like discord and my headset breaking the connection over the switch between A2DP and HFP or HSP or whatever the mic mode was. Havent had any issues since pipewire came along and supposedly took over handling that, but I havent used a Bluetooth device with a mic to test with since, so I’m just quoting hearsay that pipewire fixed that.
It’s okay. On my desktop with an Intel card my headphones occasionally have an issue where they’ll stop actually playing sounds until I swap the codec in GNOME Settings. I’m pretty sure it’s an issue with the headphones proper, because I don’t think I’ve had the issue with my earbuds or when using them on my laptop.
Speaking of my laptop, if I have WiFi turned on, the Bluetooth goes to shit. It sounds fine, but the audio will randomly cut out. I blame Realtek.
nomachine works well in my experience; it’s pretty straightforward to set up. And it offers nice performance. It’s free (as in beer), but it is proprietary software – they make their $$ selling enterprise features on their website.
I have an X1 gen 9 and sleep-on-close worked just fine with Fedora for the time I used that distro (although it was KDE, not GNOME). Every other distro I tried worked as expected in that respect.
I don’t recall ever having spent a lot of time messing with Bluetooth so I think it’s worked just fine for me for a while. I’ve used Debian, Fedora and Solus on a few different laptops and desktops. I’ll give a few headphones and speakers a go tonight and see what happens.
My need for bluetooth headphone is very simple, if I can understand youtube videos, I am happy. And I am using WF-1000MX4, which works wonderfully just using the gnome gui.
I never need to worry about pipwire or pulse audio etc.
Fun fact to keep in mind about your MX4 - if you use the “pair with two devices simultaneously” feature, the headphones shut off their LDAC support. All you get is the baseline audio codec. Nice, huh?
(I have the over the ear XM3 that don’t support multiple devices, but also have a Bose 700 that does. The Bose 700 does AAC, but I find SBC-XQ better. On the Sony it’s a toss-up, so I stick to LDAC. I’m using Fedora Silverblue 39 with PipeWire for reference.)
I haven’t had much luck with XQ. I don’t believe that Bluetooth can reliably find enough bandwidth for it, unless you’re willing to blow up a few neighbor’s WiFi points/baby monitors/microwaves/weather radar stations.
I need a bash script to restart all my bluetooth modules, bluez, bluetoothctl, eyc. because my laptop likes to make bluetooth unavailable, usually after a few hours of suspend. The script always works, and other than that I use another bash script to toggle connection to my airpods / toggle them as the default default audio output. I find it always works great besides the restartint caveat.
I don’t use Bluetooth a whole lot on my Linux box (Arch Linux 20231128, MATE Desktop Environment, bluetoothd, pulseaudio). That said, I have blueman-manager in my system tray all the time, and it seems to do a decent job of managing two pairs of headphones (they’re there, and I use them occasionally, just not often). The thing that seems to work for me is to use pavucontrol (PulseAudio Volume Control) to set the parameters of the Bluetooth headphones while they’re active and associated, and those settings are stored for later. That way, when I’m wearing a pair of those headphones my laptop’s speakers are automatically muted, the Bluetooth headphones go back to where I had them before, and whatever I happen to be playing back through (Firefox, vlc, whatever) automatically cut over to them and away from the (now muted) speakers).
I guess I just did it one step at a time - get bluetooth turned on, get a pair of headphones associated with them, then turn off speakers, then… I iterated on it until I had something that worked.
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