I’m hoping someone can help me before I completely lose my mind. Starting about two weeks ago, my Bluetooth headphones have become completely unusable on my Fedora laptop, and it’s driving me crazy.
This maybe is all the ‘issues’ i have been haved:
No Audio & Video Freezing: When I connect my headphones, audio won't play at all. If I try to watch YouTube or open a video player, the video just instantly freezes on the first frame or buffers infinitely.
Locked/Forced Connection: Usually, I can hit a physical button on my headphones to switch them over to my cell phone. Now, when they connect to Fedora, they get hard-locked. They refuse to disconnect or let go of the laptop session.
The Connection Struggle: Getting them to actually disconnect and pair correctly takes forever and requires a ridiculous amount of toggling. I have to keep pressing the headphone settings in the settting menu for it to work. See screenshot. If I do not toggle these options, the headphone's won't work. I want to die
I already tried unpairing, forgetting, and reconnecting the devices, but no luck. I also ran this sequence of commands to reset the Bluetooth stack and reinstall bluez, but the issue persists:
sudo systemctl stop bluetooth
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/bluetooth/*
sudo rfkill unblock bluetooth
sudo systemctl restart bluetooth
sudo dnf reinstall bluez gnome-bluetooth
Is anyone else experiencing this right now? If you managed to fix it (maybe by downgrading a specific audio/bluetooth package or changing a config), please let me know.
Yes, no issues. Now, roughly 2 weeks ago, something changed, maybe a random update but I don’t recall because as you may agree, there are many random upgrades to random packages that I do not really keep track of.
When your machine boots up, hold down the shift key if the grub menu does not automatically display itself. That should cause Grub to present itself showing you all of the kernels you have installed.
Pick the oldest one (usually at the bottom of the list of kernels) and hit enter.
Okay, before I want to say you fixed it, which it seems you did, I went to 7.0.13-200 rather than the 2 others listed above it, being 7.1.3-200 and 7.1.3-201 . Is there any reason why this is the solution? Why the newer kernel broke this?
If an earlier kernel works without issue and a newer one soils the bed, it usually implies that there is a kernel regression - what part has regressed can be a bugger to track down but that’s one for the kernel developers to dig into.
Given that this is in a fairly widely used area (bluetooth and external hardware connectivity) you’ll probably find that this has already been discovered, reported and may already be fixed in the next kernel.
From your perspective, you want to keep booting whichever the latest kernel is that does not cause you issues. You can carry on updating kernels, as the currently running kernel will never be removed so you can try out the latest version to see if the issue is resolved and if it’s not just reboot again, go back to your working version and continue as normal - it’ll get fixed eventually.
For the record, I’ve got a pair of Jabra Elite active 75t and they are working absolutely fine with Fedora 44 KDE; have been for a few years now.
While now, when I press the button on my bluetooth device I can hear my bluetooth device list my laptop vs my phone, it doesn’t disconnect from my computer unless I press the disconnect button on my computer, which is still a little better than it was before, where I would need to turn off the bluetooth on my laptop for it to acrually disconnect.
The last part was just you showing off your computer works without troubles haha /s , but look at the comment I just commented 20 seconds after you posted this
You don’t actually state what make and model of bluetooth headphones you have, or what bluetooth module you have in your machine, or what make and model your machine actually is.
(inxi -ezxx, apparently, is the easiest way of getting all of the relevant data into a post)
If you did, you may get more eyes on your specific set up and may well find a solution within seconds, but your posting is light on specifics so by definition, you get less attention.
It used to be inxi -Fzxx, but now inxi -ezxx is recommended.
It is not unusual to have problems with radio and/or audio devices on new kernels. For in-kernel drivers problems can be reported kernel.org, but for out-of-kernel drivers many developers wait for new kernels to be released before even attempting to build new versions. I keep USB dongles with in-kernel drivers to use while waiting waiting for working drivers to appear.
