Looking for a Bluetooth 4.2 USB adapter for a Manjaro Linux PC and Laptop

First, I have years I don’t use Bluetooth and don’t know if Bluetooth 5.0 USB adapters work with 4.2 devices. Would like to know.

I bough a Bluetooth 4.2 headset for my cellphone and would like to try with my PC and laptop too but it doesn’t come with a USB adapter. I’m not interested in PCI adpaters because I want to be able to use the USB adapter with both my laptop and PC.

It’s all backwards compatible. The changes of 4.2 vs 4.0 wouldn’t have any significant effect for your use. All of the cheap “CSR” Bluetooth dongles are plug and play in Linux, so I’d imagine most cheap dongles should work easily in most systems.

Hi. Since Bluetooth is always backward compatible the real compatibility problems come from the codecs.
SBC being the low bar everyone must be compatible with, and the others from varying companies for varying prices and usecase.

  • AAC is generalist, decent quality from Apple
  • AptX is specialized, high quality from Qualcomm (AptX LL Low Latency for you guessed it low latency for audio video sync or gaming. AptX HD for High quality audio without the ‘best’ latency but still greater than SBC though)
  • LDAC is audiophile quality from Sony
  • LHDC is a new one from Savitech (started in 2017)

To summarize you won’t find LDAC or LHDC anywhere else than Sony products or Huawei respectively. So aim for an AptX compatibility if you do not use Apple devices (Linux user :thinking:?)
A simple dongle is generally plug and play even in Linux so you won’t face trouble probably. (the Bluetooth 5.0 AptX LL and HD compatible ‘Creative BT-W3’ at 40$ is more than enough for anyone trying low latencies over Bluetooth but is still overkill if you don’t have AptX devices)

You won’t break your piggybank for a 4.2 SBC bluetooth dongle :sweat_smile:

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