[ericwooley]

On Arch, my Bluetooth headphones are working great. MPOW-x3 and sony wh-1000xm4

My biggest gripe is that I can't use the microphone at the same time as the headphones, without switching to tin can mode.

[foobarbecue]

This is a limitation of Bluetooth, not Linux. It's crazy, but no decent 2-way Bluetooth protocols exist.

[rofrol]

- https://askubuntu.com/questions/1338933/samsung-galaxy-buds-...

- https://hardwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/14017/are-t...

[bashinator]

What's the limitation? My wild-ass guess would be that rx and tx have to be on the same radio frequency, so you can't do full duplex without packet collisions.

[jagger27]

My XM4s used to pair fine on Arch too, but not anymore. I think the mic issue isn't specific to Linux but the headphones themselves.

[sheenobu]

Have you switched to pipewire? I haven't pulled the trigger yet so I'm wondering if bluetooth gets any better.

[chrismorgan]

I have a new laptop running Arch, and Bluetooth headphones which nominally can act as a headset as well, but I actively disabled that functionality under Windows, because if something tried to use the atrocious-quality headset microphone, the high-quality headphones output would silently (literally!) not work, and only the low-quality headset audio output would work.

The headset modes haven’t appeared under Linux at all, which happens to suit me just fine, so I haven’t investigated the lack. A couple of times I’ve had issues with connecting at the BlueZ level, but putting the laptop to sleep and waking it up again has resolved it. (Just restarting bluetoothd doesn’t help.)

I was running PulseAudio for a few weeks, then I switched to PipeWire. I no longer get the Bluetooth indicator on it in waybar, but other than that the switch was fairly uneventful. One point is an improvement: it now seems to remember which devices I like to use, so that when I plug in my Yeti microphone it doesn’t switch audio output to it (it has a 3.5mm monitor port and can feed audio from the computer through that too), which it had always done under PulseAudio and I hadn’t yet gone to the trouble of figuring out how to stop it from doing that. One point in the Bluetooth device handling is potentially a slight regression: when silence should be being fed through the connection, I observe extremely quiet whine which I didn’t under PulseAudio. Not sure what’s at fault there.

[da_big_ghey]

yes much better and greater reliable with codec switching. i encourage switch. also mSBC better 2way sound

[da_big_ghey]

pipewire better in this, use mSBC having better quality 2way sounds