[owowow]

What doesn't work with Bluetooth today on a distro like Debian 10?

I have Bluetooth 4.1 built into my WiFi card, over the last year the only issue I have had was manually having to switch to HSP mode on my headphones to use the Mic. Switching from A2DP to HSP was easy, just click Audio in the settings menu in the upper right corner in Gnome.

Besides that, Bluetooth mice and headphones &keyboards just work.

[Cynox]

On my Dell 13in XPS laptop from 2018 (9370), Bluetooth used to allmost work, but I had to manually pair my headset every time. Now, with the latest Ubuntu, it often connects automatically, but then looses connection immediately, or fails to see that the device can play audio. After some fiddling and turning the device on an off it will work if i start playing audio right away. It will then work for a long time. The amount of fiddling and rebooting of headphones seems to grow with every new Ubuntu release. It may also be a user space error, but in any case, Bluetooth is far from "just working", unfortunately.

[therealrootuser]

Are you using an Intel wireless chipset or the terrible Broadcom one that Dell used to use? Not sure what Dell was using in 2018, but I replaced the garbage Broadcom chip in my 2015-era XPS 13 with a much more reliable Intel model, and most of by bluetooth problems were immediately fixed.

That said, the replacement process is pretty fiddly...Dell likes using lots of very small screws made of very soft metal.

I've also found that Gnome's bluetooth handling varies from barely acceptable to confusingly horrible. KDE's bluetooth handling has been way more reliable for me across multiple machines and distros. So the problem may very well be in userspace.

[kmarc]

If you want that to happen automatically, "you can append auto_switch=2 to load-module module-bluetooth-policy in /etc/pulse/default.pa"

(from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bluetooth_headset#Switc...)

[JoshTriplett]

Many bluetooth headphones support microphones with A2DP, though. And if yours do, you likely want to use that rather than HSP, because HSP has much worse audio quality.

[FeistySkink]

I'm on latest Fedora and sometime this year headphone volume synchronization stopped working for headphones that never had this issue for me since release (Sony WH-1000XM2). Volume synchronization continues to work as expected on Android.

[xtracto]

I have always had trouble connecting bluetooth headphones into my Linux Mint installation.