I’ve been thinking about getting a pair of Bluetooth headphones. I was looking at the Sony WH-1000XM3, but then I got to thinking: do I need to be concerned about Linux compatibility with Bluetooth headphones? Nothing I found online would indicate so (besides warnings that Bluetooth in general can be a pain to get working), but I thought I’d ask someone before I shell out several hundred euros for the headphones, only to find out they don’t work with any of my computers. If someone here has experience with using this particular model on Linux, that’s even better.
My 1000XM2 and my Bose QC 35 connects just fine with bluetooth on both Arch, Manjaro and Ubuntu
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Yes. For your BT headphones work you’ll need a compatible card and that’s where the pain starts.
Wait to see if someone comes over with your specific answer. Tell us your card info btw
As long as the Bluetooth radio on your system works and supports the profiles used by your device, you should be fine. That model of headphones do support the A2DP profile, so you should be good there.
Intel Bluetooth radios work fine on most major distros and should only be a problem on distros that explicitly prohibit binary blobs.
Many non-Intel boards use Intel radios, including the Asrock Ryzen board I’m writing this from.
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When optical audio works in Linux, you could get a blutooth transmitter that accepts Toslink in. Such as this one
They work ok. There’s just the issue when mic is enabled.
When mic is active (hfp/hsp profile), sound quality is rather poor compared to when they are only used for listening (a2dp profile). Been a while since I looked into it, at that time this was unavoidable.
Now and again, I have to untrust or remove my headset, and rediscover them again for them to work properly. This has never happened in windows, on my phone, TV or htpc. Only happens in Linux for some reason.
The cheat ones with “CSR 4.0” on them seem to work really well. I have one that I modified with an old router antenna and that thing works great for me. I have a few of them and never had any connection issues.
My laptop on the other hand really sucks. It is forever dropping the connection. Trying to disable it on a hardware level without wrecking the wifi so I can use a USB dongle is above my pay grade. Eventually I will get sick of it and replace the wifi card. It’s an Intel, but for whatever reason the Bluetooth has been irritating.
I personally haven’t had any issues using the cheapest possible Bluetooth stuff to connect with either my phone or my Linux PC’s, so I would hope a name brand device would just work out of the box as well.
I’ve got a Dell XPS 15 laptop running Fedora 31 and a pair of Plantronics Backbeat Pro 2 headphones. The combination works really well. Only occasional static and skipping. Nothing major. And the connection seems solid out to 100 feet or more, depending on obstacles.
As hem said though, trying to use the microphone screws it all up. It wants to go into some kind of awful telephone mode.
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 7265 (rev 59)
I’m on Fedora right now. Fedora is one of the more uptight distros when it comes to this sort of thing, right?
Thanks, I’ll avoid using the microphone. It’s a shame if it doesn’t work right on Linux, but with how rarely I have need for a microphone, I’m sure I’ll be fine with using a separate microphone instead.
Fedora is one of the more uptight distros when it comes to this sort of thing, right?
Fedora’s policy permits binary blobs as long as they’re redistributable, and all of Intel’s blobs meet that criteria.
So it should Just Work™.
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