Major Bluetooth Issues Bazzite 41

Bazzite
1

Ive just complete a new install on a fairly straight forward system:

Asrock x570 Steel Series
AMD 5800X
AMD 6900 XT
1TB Samusing SSD
32GB Ram

Everything went according to plan and all things except Bluetooth are functioning perfectly.

Now I have tried

3 different USB Bluetooth dongles(Realtek, Cambridge Silicon)
4 Xbox One S controllers
Sony XM5 Headphones

All usb dongles have issues and require unpluging and replugging to actually work, and when they do work, I can not get anything to connect, all of these devices work perfectly fine in Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, WIndows 10, Windows 11 and even OpenFyde/FydeOS so there is no issue with any of this hardware.

There is some really strange issues with Bazzite 41 and Bluetooth, if I mess about with the following:

sudo bluetoothctl
scan on
pair (device of choice)
trust (device of choice)
connect (device of choice))

I can get a controller to pair and connect, but then it drops out and wont work again, each of the bluetooth controllers seem to have odd behaviour unique to it, but I know they all work 100% on every other OS I have tested them with, 2 of them I specifically got for long range audio use, the othe is just some random cheap useless thing, but does work.

After messing about for many hours, I finally got a controller to work, but after a reboot, it wont connect again.

I have now dragged out my Xbox USB dongles 1 of the 2 works, but it too requires me to unplug it and re-plug it in on a cold boot, but it at least works, but no chance of the headphones working.

Now I have no issue with bluetooth on my Legion Go or my Minis Forum machine, but they had these devices added prior to upgrading to 41.

At this point I have tried everything I can possible try, but I cant use this OS on this machine in this state, so I will have to put Windblows back on it, as 2 days of messing about is enough, It shouldn’t be like this with known working hardware.

1 Like
2

I use an USB Wifi adaptor and I have tried several Linux distributions and under ALL of them the same problem: when you boot up, the adaptor is in a switched off state and I can’t see any other solution except to unplug & replug it into the USB port, and then it works perfectly and even continues after a warm reboot but a cold reboot will again leave it switched off. I don’t think this is related to distributions so much as some driver/firmware issue. Sadly Linux on the desktop is still FULL of papercuts like this. It almost works but will give you several papercuts and minor issues that vary from one distro to another but no distro ever works 100%. While some OSS software is either not regularly updated or poorly coded the overwhelming problem actually is hardware support. Even in 2024 too many hardware makers treat Linux as third class. If they supply a firmware/driver at all, it is often not as featureful as their Windows driver, almost deliberately (you’d think) borked in a minor manner. I don’t know if or when this will ever change.

3

You probably can make a little script that unloads and loads the wifi kernel driver on boot. it is kind of a nasty workaround but it totally should work. Which USB Wifi adapter do you have? Maybe we can make that script for you. - Try plugging your adapter, unplugging it, and plugging it back again then sending the output from dmesg here as a file or something

4

Idk about bluetooth but I have the same problems with Xbox x/s wireless controller dongle. It works, I can connect two controllers and it pairs and connects them. But after I switch controller off and try to connect again one of two things would happen:

  1. Controller is unable to connect to dongle
  2. Controller connects to dongle but software like Steam don’t see it as connected

Solution in both cases is to unplug and replug the dongle. Sometimes the same happens after booting system - it won’t work until I replug dongle first.

I tested this dongle with same controllers in Win11, Mint and EndeavourOS and all is fine, it’s only Bazzite being weird about this.

5

Similarly for me, with F41, bluetooth maouse and keyboard works fine (already paired) but headphones won’t pair. If I toggle bluetooth, it will just break completely until I reboot my system.
ROG Strix G834JY

Edit: Seams that this affect me: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219447
Should be patched soon

6

I switched this particular machine back to Windows, as I wanted to actually play my games, I have very limited time, and I just need it to work, but I have discovered after raising this post, I did an update to KDE Neon on my daily driver laptop, and out of the blue, my bluetooth devices are playing up???

My daily driver bluetooth earbuds just get kicked randomly now, tried everything, even setup Neon on another Laptop with an AX200 card, and exact same weird issue, this has been happening for a number of days, these buds work on everything else, Apple gear, Android, Windows, and normally Linux with zero issues, and then I wake up this morning, another large update to KDE Noen, and magically, they are working perfectly again.

This weekend I will grab a spare NVME drive and setup Bazzite on this gaming rig again and test the bluetooth again, it may have been some strange Kernel issue? hopefully it fixes itself with an update, if not, I will setup Fedora 41 and see if the issue is also there.

I dont see unplugging and plugging in USB dongles or running funky scripts and even having to toggle or restart services as a real fix, bluetooth should be like a light switch in this day and age, it should just work, normally I see better bluetooth support on Linux over Windows, but something has gone all pair-shaped recently as I have seen a number of complaints related to Bluetooth on more cutting edge Linux releases floating arounf the web.