While this is not correct, and I do use my BT headphone with Ubuntu 20.04, it's is almost true for any casual user.

Indeed, the number of glitches and irritating workaround I have to use to make something else than a mouse work with BT is something most people don't want to put up with their $1000 laptop.

Yes, BT is a shitty tech. But their phone works out of the box. Their Mac OS and Windows as well.

The fact we still get BT not pairing randomly (or wifi stop working, or sleep mode never awaking) is a huge problem in 2021.

We should not ignore that as a community.

That's why I report bugs, give money and help people online.

But it will not be enough if we close our eyes on the work yet to be done.

> But it will not be enough if we close our eyes on the work yet to be done.

I very much agree with your sentiment, but I simply don't have any issues with BT headphones on Linux desktops specifically I could work on today.

Bluetooth is a very a complex set of standards - I work as a system architect for a well-known celestial car brand, and implementing Bluetooth and BLE is the bane of our existence; truly disastrous technology - and I'm sure things to improve are aplenty, though. In terms of desktop biz logic, the roll-out and maturation of the PipeWire stack is one ongoing effort to watch for.

Yes, and then you have Wifi, touchpads, graphic cards, web cams... It's amazing that we even have a working OS honestly.

Thanks for saying this, it gets to the root of the problem being Bluetooth.

What should we support instead? Is there another wireless standard?

I've noticed there are models that use some kind of non-Bluetooth USB dongle for example.

Thank you for saying this. As someone new to Linux, it's easy to be intimidated by Linux users saying "but it works for me!".

Where do you give money? I've looked into a few projects but it's pretty fragmented. Donating money to Ubuntu was a trip...required digging through forums and finally "Downloading" Ubuntu to trigger the "donate money" pop up.

Linux needs more options for people like me to pay for polish.

I have a list of FOSS projects I rotate and donate to regularly, including Ubuntu and the FSF. So many projects need help, VLC, libreoffice, firefox, python, ublock origin...

It's not just about the money, it's also a way for devs to feel that their work matters.

For an end user who isn't a Linux enthusiast, generally working headphones aren't sufficient. They have to almost never not work.

I record music on Linux, and one of the reasons that I never recommend it is that I can imagine people dropping real money on a sufficiently powerful laptop and finding things don't work without a lot of configuration, or perhaps not at all. That doesn't cut it for the average user.

Thank you for saying this. Yes, it doesn't cut it for the average user.

Have you thought about donating to open source projects to support them along?

Linux is the only viable option. It must improve.

Yes I've donated to some :)

That’s the problem though isn’t it? Imagine if some people just weren’t able to get their mouse or airpods working with their laptop. Of course, airpods work for everyone’s iphone, and I’ve never had a bluetooth mouse that didn’t work with Windows.

Until Linux works out of the box for everyone it’s not going to see mainstream adoption.

I’ve had similar experiences across multiple different Bluetooth chipsets in several different motherboards.

I’ve never been able to get AirPods to work and it took several hours and some custom code to get my Bose headphones to work. It’s not what I would consider to be even close to similar to macOS/Windows

^ this. Custom code to get headphones to work is exactly the type of thing that is only viable for developers. Linux needs to move beyond this "for mechanics only" mindset for it to succeed.

Same, could not get Airpods to connect AT ALL. They would show up, "connect" for a second then disconnect.

I've done nothing special to use Bluetooth headphones with my Linux computers (a Dell laptop, a Lenovo workstation and a Lenovo laptop, running either Fedora or Ubuntu) and I use a variety of them regularly:

- Samsung Galaxy Buds Live that came with my last smartphone

- Some fancy Jabra-brand headset we get from work

- My wife's Sennheiser Momentum Wireless when I don't bring my own

- Not headphones per-se, but in the office meeting rooms we have Logitech desk mics I connect to all the time

No config or installing additional software needed beyond pairing.

Based on my own samples the above makes me suspect "AirPods don't comply well with standards" or something along those lines.

Does your mic work in the headphones?

These were Sony XM3 in particular. After installing a bunch of software through the CLI I got them to play sound.

But the mic never worked. I saw similar stories online of everyone just saying "stick with wired mics".

Yep, mic works for me. My main mic is actually wired, too (a RODE NT-USB), but just for audio quality reasons. I use the Galaxy Buds Live for meetings when I'm in the living room because my wife needs our office room for something, and I use the Logitech desk mics in the office, and those work. I can't remember about the Jabra off-hand.

Thanks I'll check those Galaxy Buds out.

I have Airpods as well as Jabra Elite 65t, Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro, and various Plantronics. The Apple are the only ones that are wonky. There seems to be some other protocol for them that needs to be enabled, but I didn't bother and just switched to the Galaxy Buds Pro (the Jabras are excellent as well.)

The very first DDG result for "airpods linux bluetooth" is this one: https://askubuntu.com/questions/922860/pairing-apple-airpods...

Does the mic work in any of these? I found it to be impossible

Re: airpods linux bluetooth -- CLI commands to get bluetooth headphones just to play sound is not viable for Linux to take off.

You have to change the profile from "headphones" (high quality audio) to "headset" to have a microphone. It's a matter of a few clicks.

I'm just pointing out that Apple was doing something different. As far as that being not viable for Linux to take off... well, I respect your opinion.

The instructions you linked state that to connect Airpods one needs to:

Set ControllerMode = bredr or ControllerMode = dual by editing /etc/bluetooth/main.conf file using sudo nano /etc/bluetooth/main.conf command (or another text editor of your choice)

sudo /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

Try to pair again.

Blame manufacturers.

Of course it's not as good as MacOS + Apple headphones but I think more recent Linux distros that use PipeWire as the audio backend are ahead of Windows. On Windows, A2DP support is so limited that headsets like the Sony XM4s suffer from worse latency and sound quality, particularly terrible mic quality, while on Kubuntu everything works out of the box with the same quality you get when paired with a phone. There's still the issue of unstable drivers that break out of nowhere and require rebooting for Bluetooth to work again, but Windows has the same problem on my laptop.

I’ll add to this - I can generally hack away at Linux, build my own yocto for custom SBCs etc but I gave up trying to get my QC35s paired with my Linux box

Thanks for saying this. I'm a Mac user. I don't know jack about this stuff. It's easy for Linux users to say "it works for me dummy!". But it doesn't work for me. I had to run CLI commands just to install Brave, are you kidding me? (https://brave.com/linux/)

I can't imagine less computer savvy people putting up with this.

If your distribution offers synaptic it helps immensely as a gateway drug to apt/rpm.

https://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/

But to install it you still need the cli. After that you get a GUI interface to search and install packages

A lot of the "beginner friendly" distros will install a GUI frontend in the default install and label it "software center" or "app store" or similar.

Only certain ones -- not AirPods, for example.

They work as headphones, but not as a headset with microphone (for reasons that are not really Apple's fault)

Does the mic in your headphones work?

Edited to clarify that while 3 pairs of headphones required fiddling to get 1 connected, the microphone was basically impossible to get working. The majority of threads I've found online have said basically not to bother with getting bluetooth headphones+mic, use a wired one or something else.

I have two different Jabra bluetooth headsets, both work on Linux with a microphone, but you have to change to the headphone profile (using something like pavu) to enable the microphone.

I use them regularly as well, never had a problem, not even when setting them up the first time.

microphone too? What model, I'll get it.