Recently I opened my window and realized that the year was 2023 and decided to buy a bluetooth keyboard.
Decided to go with Keychron K5SE. The keyboard allows to be used with bluetooth protocol, and can switch between 3 connections. One connection was used for my home pc, which uses win10. But for the second I wanted to connect it to my working laptop (which is hidden behind the desk), which uses Ubuntu (20.04, and then 22 something LTS).
But I can’t pair it to last. The moment I off/on the BT on the laptop or even switch between connections, it cannot reconnect. The ui is showing that it’s trying to connect, but fails at first steps.
I’ve googled this and found many similarities to my problem. People say that you need to make it trusted. Have done this both by CLI and some UI itility (blueman, I think… just to be sure that I’m not missing anything). But still no luck.
Windows doesn’t seem to have any of that and works like a charm.
I didn’t go as far as to try different distros to see if Ubuntu’s the fault (it’s a working laptop, so I don’t want to play “lets spend N days to install different distros” game… and yeah, I know about LiveUSB).
I know this isn’t particularly helpful but I am running Fedora and a keychron keyboard with no issues. Have you check the connection with other BT devices to see if it is keychron or your BT radio on the laptop?
Sometimes the quality of the bluetooth depends on the maker/firmware. What is the WiFi model of your laptop? An intel wifi+bt seems to fare better than atheros or broadcom.
Gonna try Fedora on VM just to see how it performs (and if all my working apps can be installed). But from yesterday I mostly read positive things about Fedora (but there was some note that it’s not as good as Ubunta for devs… no reason why though).
Had an idea of moving away from Ubuntu (the 20 to 22 LTS did brick a few things for me).
Ok Arch Wiki says its a known good laptop for Linux, which gives me the impession that this could be an issue with your Ubuntu drivers. Try Fedora? Im using one with my m3400 and its works fine. Unsure about your particular Wifi+BT chipset. It helps if it is Intel.
Currently getting familiar with it using OracleVM (and starting to get the impression that either I somehow screwed the install of it doesn’t like VirtualBox).
Regarding with apps, you have to compile from source if your apps are somehow .deb only (in the case of Signal). It has excellent support for flatpak. Snaps should be OK. I havent encountered issues with AppImages so far.
I think I’m fine with package support (only need Intellij, jdk, docker and stuff). Only thing that bothers me is that Fedora 37 (all of a sudden) has terrible compatibility with VMs - already tried VirtualBox (works slow as hell), HyperV (fails to resolve network), and now VMWare (after few hours I finally made it to a point where I can actually open Firefox). But maybe this is a 3+ year old Win10 installation speaking (need to clean up the network adapters and stuff). Also 3D acceleration on any VM seems to have huge issues. But all of that is VM, so I believe having it installed on a regular PC won’t bring up these issues (I hope).
Qemu is pretty much the best virtual machine on Linux - don’t let the fact that it is command line only scare you, like GDB and vim it is magical once you figure it out.
for what it’s worth I also have a Keychron K2 that i simply cannot get to work reliably with bluetooth
my solution was to shut the window and go back to 1983 and use a cable lmao
i know it’s not a solution, but bluetooth is dog shit, it has always been dog shit and it knows I hate it therefore it tries to give me the shits in any way it can
Looks at a usb hub, placed on the desk, extended from the laptop Looks at the one of the 3 cables on the entire desktop, one of which ends with a USB-C, going from that hub just to connect that kb in the old fashion way
The pain!
That’s the problem. I also have a Corsair keyboard with a thick cable and a wired mouse. Those currently simply don’t have a replacement. I do have a wireless mouse, but Corsair seems to have poor production quality plastic coating(which is strange, since my K95 Platinum keyboard is somewhere to 5 years old now… and, beside the parts which broke off… and a key on the numpad, which I killed, still has zero problems in that regard) which is way worse than Roccat’s, so I ended up hooking my Kone AIMO back (and not swearing every time when I feel my palm sticking to the mouse… and I have clean hands and a clean mouse).
For the BT being “that bad”. Well, the silly part is that the BT itself seems NOT to be the problem - it’s the software and drivers. I have a few wireless AptX headphones, which are connected to a decently made flagship OnePlus smartphone - I can leave the phone in one room and listen to music throughout the house.
And yes, I do understand that it’s more “big chunks of data with fewer transmitting times”, but still.
Also with Win10, I have my pc on one side of a quite big room, and a bed with a 55" TV infront of it (have a 20m HDMI cable running to it from the PC). I sometimes use the Corsair mouse (with it’s 2.4Ghz controller) and that Keychron for those lazy days to play games right out of bed - the BT works quite well (I am thinking of finding a longer antenna to maybe bring it closer to the bed).
