Hello,
I am not able to figure out whatever bluetooth issues I am having. None of my devices stay connected and will never reconnect once disconnected. I have a pair of WH-XM4 and they will not stay connected. Here is what I tried so far:
Reinstall BlueZ
Check for blocking with rfkill
Restart Bluetooth, but I just get this error “Bluez Daemon is not running, blueman-manager cannot continue”
I’m at my wits end. Please help.
My experience with Bluetooth support in Linux is: you’re either using one of the very few problem-free BT controllers and it works okay most of the time, or you have more or less problems all of the time.
The least problematic controllers I own are ASUS USB-BT500. The most problematic are ASUS USB-BT400 and Realtek RTL8821CE.
The state of Bluetooth in Linux is completely terrible, it has been for many, many years and it’s hardly getting any better. Bluez, like Pulseaudio, needs to die, and sooner rather than later.
Lol well I am using BT400 dongle, so that doesn’t bode too well. As a new user, why is Bluetooth so bad? Don’t love Windows, but at least Bluetooth is painless over there, for the most part
A lot of those BT adapters are cheap shit. Like the aforementioned RTL8821CE: it’s a nasty hack to do wifi and BT using a single 2.4 GHz transponder. But here’s the thing: however bad they are, they’re made to work well in Windows - possibly with a lot of awful engineering shortcuts and hackery, but in the end, Windows users will never know and that’s the point.
When open-source developers try to make equivalent Linux drivers without documentation or help from the manufacturer, reverse-engineering their way around the general crappiness of the products, you get… well, not very good drivers. And it really is nobody’s fault but the unhelpful adapter’s manufacturer.
So there is that, and the general bugginess on BlueZ on top of it.
Thanks for the added context. That makes sense
Buy a supported usb bt dongle, they’re tiny. Better than fighting with models that don’t work well.
The most problematic are ASUS USB-BT400 and Realtek RTL8821CE
Can confirm. The Realtek adapter in my HP laptop is a major PITA. Both BT & wifi have problems that I’ve only able to partially resolve.
You need to check the various logs, dmesg, syslog and probably manually start the services on a command line to see what errors they produce.
I have similar problems with devices disconnecting from my Realtek BT/wifi card. I was able to significantly reduce (but not completely eliminate) the problems by disabling power management for the BT adapter’s associated USB port.
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Mint has been the most particular distro for bluetooth for me. I noticed there is a difference between “connecting” and “pairing”. I have to “pair” the first time my device is connected and then “connect” every subsequent time. If I pair the device to another computer I have to re-pair on Mint.
I agree with everyone saying just to get a new dongle. It’s not worth the headache spending hours trying to get one to work when you can get one that’ll work much better for pretty cheap. When i got my current laptop i specifically got a model that has ubuntu support from the manufacturer even tho i don’t run ubuntu. Because all the hardware in it will atleast be decently linux compatible if they want to ship it with ubuntu sometimes.
Also Mint is typically pretty good about drivers so if its not working on Mint then yeah its gonna be a pain to fix is my guess.
