Hello all,
I hope I’m posting this in an appropriate place.
I have a “Intel Corp. Wireless-AC 9260 Bluetooth Adapter” installed in a PCIe slot on my motherboard, and it’s been reliable enough for various Wi-Fi and Bluetooth tasks over the years.
Recently I’ve gotten into playing more video games on my computer, and inviting friends over to play with me. Naturally, my collection of game controllers has expanded from one to…uh…six.
I recently bought a couple of newfangled Playstation 5 (DualSense) controllers, which pair to my computer just fine but seem to have trouble maintaining simultaneous connections with my computer. With both of them connected, and especially with an extra PS4 controller or two connected, it’s only a matter of time before one or more of them suddenly disconnects. This behavior is fairly random, usually once everyone has picked their character and we’ve played a couple of rounds of our game.
I’ve messed around in the Gnome Bluetooth settings, as well as in bluetoothctl CLI in my terminal. Re-pairing the controllers, toggling their “trust”, etc. It’s possible that Steam is contributing to the issue, but my main suspect is the Bluetooth card itself.
So after all of that background, my main question: is it plausible that these high-bandwidth Bluetooth devices would have trouble sharing connections to my PC? Googling around for Bluetooth advice feels like a maze of rumors about which versions are compatible with what. Is there a straightforward way to check if a given set of devices will be well-supported by my Bluetooth chipset?
Thank you in advance for any insight,
Jacob
I have a mouse, keyboard and, periodically, a headset connected to my win10 pc. Never had this issue. I think I even had it on two mobos - a z370, and a z790.
But I do think that this is linux related. I recently built a x870 msi tomahawk system, and decided to connect the same group of devices. The distro is Fedora 41.
And they don’t play along. The mouse periodically stutters (and I have an usb mouse connected in parallel to cross out the system throttling). The headset begins to play “damaged” for some seconds. Sometimes I can’t even pair the headset. In the meanwhile, the KB is working fine.
Never thought of it as several device instance problem, but starting to think in that direction.
In contrast, I tried booting Win10 from a separate drive to cross out anything related to the hardware. And there all works flawlessly (even with stress tests in the background).
I have ordered a separate WiFi/BT pci-e card, which is on the way. Will see how that plays out.
1 Like
I’ve spent some more time troubleshooting my specific setup. Here are some notes.
- These DualSense controllers do not like to coexist. Attempting to connect one works fine, but connecting a second controller usually fails (but not always)
- I have noticed that if I attempt to connect both DualSense controllers at the same time they will both connect successfully. However, after 1-10 minutes one usually wins out and the other disconnects.
- If any DualSense controller is connected, I cannot pair my DualShock 4 controller. As soon as all DualSense controllers are disconnected, the DualShock 4 controller pairs and connects without any issue. If I connect the DualShock 4 controller first, I can get one DualSense to connect with it but not a second DualSense…and the DualShock 4 disconnects soon after in favor of that connected DualSense.
- I have successfully gotten a game going with three controllers before, and I briefly connected four at the same time. However, it seems like only a matter of time before something disconnects. And, having a DualSense in the mix seems to guarantee something will go wrong. The more controllers, the more volatile the setup.
The behaviors of these controllers all feel so random! Sometimes they refuse to connect together, other times they will for a while…sometimes I think having Steam open helps them coexist for longer but I don’t have any firm evidence for that. “Steam Input” is necessary for some games, but must be disabled for others. The random disconnects happen in both games I’ve tested, though.
This thread gives me some hope that my issues are specific to my Bluetooth card. There are some suggestions there to rollback to an old driver version…might see if it’s viable to install that on Linux. At some point it’s easier to just buy a fresh Bluetooth card and see if that helps anything…suggestions welcome 
Hoping this solves your issues! If you get the chance I’d be interested to hear an update. I am also on Fedora (now on 42) so perhaps we’d benefit from the same solution.
Sure.
There will be two updates on behalf of this.
I am planning to move the pc, which has Fedora on it, to Ubuntu (sad day, but I finally had my share of frustration, trying to comply with company security policy software). I did come across statements that Ubuntu has better support.
And yeah, will reply “once I finally get my message, that the card, ordered from a different country”, finally made it and will be delivered.
1 Like
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash btusb.enable_autosuspend=0"
So disabling autosuspend fixed the disconnect issue for you? I’ll have to try this out. I also just got another Bluetooth card in the mail that I’ll give a go.
It was a temporary fix. After a few suspends (I don’t know how much is this part related to the problem), I once again got the sound distortion.
BUT. I tried a Fedora 42 live cd, which has Kernel 6.14, from where I could finally get my pci-e wifi/bt card working. There I finally saw a huge improvement in the BT connection problem (headphones got discovered in a matter of seconds, and the sound itself was much better).