#Bluez (#bluetooth) on #Linux has been kinda ass lately. Previously it went through regressions which caused some game controllers to no longer work on BT such as #DualShock4 and #DualSense when they were perfectly fine before. Just upgraded to 5.71 and now my Bose QC45 stopped working on BT too.
Update: Solved by forgetting and repairing the device, which still isn't ideal but glad that worked. Will need to test if the issue reoccurs upon next boot, otherwise I probably will either use Timeshift to go back, or simply downgrade all the bluez packages.
Another update: At least the update seems to actually have fixed the DualSense issue so that's nice! Haven't tested, but I expect connection issues with DS4 should be fixed too.
How is it after so many years #Linux still manages to totally fuck up the most basic and common use of #Bluetooth (audio)?
Every Bluetooth device I own connects to my Android phone without a hiccup. Every Bluetooth device I've tried (a subset of the first group) works without a hitch on the Windows machine at work.
But my main Linux box at home? About half of them don't work.
It should be a fucking embarrassment, but it seems the F/OSS crowd doesn't "grok" shame.
#Bluetooth is a fiendishly complicated protocol. I've used it on-and-off since about 2008 or so. #Android uses a completely different stack to desktop Linux. Things may be better on Windows, but there were as many as 3 different BT stacks for Windows (Toshiba, Widcomm, Microsoft).
Early attempts used an #ALSA kernel driver for Bluetooth… worked, but 8kHz mono is not the way I like to listen to music. And I'd imagine, unless your choice of music is 1930s swing, probably not yours either.
BlueZ (the standard Bluetooth stack on most Linux systems) pivoted across to doing it in user-space using PulseAudio. That worked okay for A2DP one-way audio, but for full-duplex audio, it is limiting. Notably, I found I couldn't get mSBC CODEC working, so full-duplex audio was 8kHz not 16kHz.
Most of the effort is going into linking #BlueZ and #pipewire, which I think will be the #PulseAudio successor (and may also displace #JACK.. as it has features of both systems).
Pipewire was written to do video actually (webcams), but then evolved to do audio too out of necessity. It's experimental, but I find works more reliably with Bluetooth. (And plays nicer with sound cards than JACK.)