Hey all,
Quick situation context:
I have a single desktop PC (Fedora 42 Workstation) that I use to drive both my office setup (upstairs) and my living room setup (downstairs). When used for my living room, it’s almost exclusively to play games with a bluetooth controller.
I use a Raspberry Pi in my living room with VirtualHere to passthrough USB devices over my LAN to my desktop in the office. This works amazingly well for my wired devices like dance pads as well as my wireless bluetooth devices as I have a generic bluetooth USB adapter plugged into the Raspberry Pi. Everything is forwarded to my desktop PC without a hitch.
The problem:
I recently built a new PC and it’s the first motherboard I’ve ever owned with onboard bluetooth. Obviously, this is a great feature to have and I use it here and there so I don’t want to disable it. This presents a problem, however… When I power on my Raspberry Pi and VirtualHere initializes, it successfully forwards its bluetooth adapter as a USB device to my desktop PC, but GNOME does not support multiple bluetooth adapters in its UI and defaults to the onboard adapter at all times.
For now, I’ve been working around this by manually hopping into the terminal and using bluetoothctl to switch to the Raspberry Pi’s bluetooth adapter to scan for and pair with my controllers while I’m in the living room. This works, but is tedious.
What I’m looking for:
Does anyone know of a GUI tool or GNOME extension that makes working with multiple bluetooth adapters easy and intuitive? Ideally something that can remember paired devices/names when switching adapters. Alternatively, something that gets GNOME to prefer the most recently initialized bluetooth adapter.
A cursory search wasn’t turning up much outside of CLI solutions that I’d like to avoid for my living room experience. It’s currently a long weekend here and I need someone to stop me from writing my own tool for this. The weather is nice, I should be outside. 