I am one of those poor bastards that had a hell of a time getting my Airpods working with Linux. Searches led me to going to /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and changing ControllerMode to “bredr”. This got the AirPods working, but then my bt keyboard and mouse wouldn’t connect.
What I wound up doing was switching ControllerMode to bredr, connecting the airpods, then switching ControllerMode back to “dual”. That kept them connected and allowed other devices to also connect.
So, now I’m sharing this for other poor bastards like me who could t get them to work with the steps that are out there.
This worked in Fedora 38 and will be testing with Ubuntu 23.04 and maybe arch today.
In general I recommend to just get a bluetooth audio adapter. They typically just work with linux and you don’t have to deal with the bluetooth part. They will simply show up as audio device and that’s it. They are also fairly cheap (between €10 and €30).
So it’s like a dongle plugged in via USB?
You could say so. Or you could consider it a “soundcard” plugged in via USB (that conveniently connects to your bluetooth headset).
IMHO this is more a hack than a solution. I love it when things just work out the way they should on Linux as well as on any other OS. Having to use half-baked solutions like this might really turn away potential Linux users.
Then again, I never had major software-related Bluetooth audio issues on Linux, apart from general lag / audio-video offset. But this is an even bigger issue on Windows afaik…
It’s not half-baked. Dedicated bluetooth chips can also achieve far better performance. Some of these devices pack qualcom chips that can do lowlatency audio out of the box. And you can use them on basically any device (PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, etc.; everything that allows usb audio devices). I also use it on Windows and it saves me a lot of trouble there; even though Windows does have bluetooth drivers as well.