I had to unprotect a deep registry entry and clear out my audio devices, at which time the relevant entries came back after a reboot. Any normal user would have been stuck with reinstalling.
It’s quite amazing how many “edges” Windows still has. I’m very close to figuring out how I can have a Windows VM w/ graphics card passthrough just for games on top of Linux. It might have warts too, but at least I can fix it.
As of today I think no operating system performs this switch correctly. It's been broken in desktop Linux for a couple years now.
Agree with you that I never got it working consistently in Linux. Just getting normal BT headphones to use A2DP rather than HSP was always a bit tricky. I've not dared try my gamer headphones...
It used to work much better in the bluez4 era, about a decade ago, than it does now.
Do note these are Bluetooth profiles. This is irrelevant to ouput device switching.
The fact that I've been able to figure out what's going on and am therefore able to work around the problem with only minor inconvenience is neither here nor there. Most users with the same setup will not be in a position to understand or do anything about the problem. Microsoft will degrade their audio, and they will live with it. Same with Edge.
I personally suspect Microsoft will argue that reverting certain system settings to defaults every update is SOP because they've been doing it elsewhere.
For example: sound settings. My physical Bose headphones show up as 2 different logical bluetooth headphones, one with sound that sucks, and one with sound that doesn't suck. Whenever Windows chooses the one with sound that sucks, I go into sound settings and disable it. This prevents sucky audio for a few months until an update lands, the sound settings get reverted, and the sucky audio returns. Ugh.