Bluetooth audio has been broken in Fedora for a few weeks

Bluez 5.59 is broken. Bluetooth audio devices cannot do a new pairing. If you already paired your devices, they will still work… but new pairings will not.

To be clear: This is a Bluez issue with audio devices, not a PipeWire issue.

Sadly, this version of Bluez is what Fedora 34 has been using for a few weeks. (Arch has been using it too, apparently.) And there’s no indication of a new release upstream yet nor has there been a hotfix patch to fix the issue applied in Fedora at this time.

Upstream issue: https://github.com/bluez/bluez/issues/157

Bugzilla issue: 1976795 – Bluetooth audio devices all fail on Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 7th Gen (It affects more than just the devices listed there.)

Workaround is to downgrade Bluez, remove /var/lib/bluetooth/*, reboot.

On Workstation, downgrading is a matter of running dnf downgrade bluez. Downgrading is annoying on Silverblue, as you have to find and download the packages for Bluez 5.58 (bluez bluez-libs bluez-obexd bluez-cups) and run rpm-ostree override replace bluez*rpm (and remove the offending device in /var/lib/bluetooth/ or just remove them all and then reboot).

Hopefully someone sees this issue somewhere and fixes it. Simply downgrading or having a hotfix won’t fully fix this problem, as previously attempted pairings will still fail if not removed, unless there’s a fix upstream for that. But downgrading or applying the patch would at least prevent more people from falling into this issue in the first place.

Hopefully Fedora can have this patched or downgraded soon, regardless of upstream.

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There has been a Bluez release!

Now we just need to get this into Fedora. :grin:

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bluez-5.60-1.fc34 is now in bodhi
https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2021-db083822ee

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