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by pizza234 2611 days ago
> -Default bluetooth config doesn't work for some devices

Bluetooth (Bluez) is a trainwreck on any distro; even the version shipped with Ubuntu 18.04 (LTS!) is broken.

2 comments

This is true, F29 just happened to ship with an extra-broken default config.

Though I have yet to see any BT implementation that isn't at least a little bit broken. Nobody actually conforms to the spec so you have to attempt to make your noncomforance work with the widest possible variety of other vendors' nonconformance and you'll always find device combinations that just don't work together.

Not my experience. Or, if anything, bluetooth on Ubuntu works much better than on my Windows laptop (Lenovo).
Certainly YMMV applies, however, it's important to distinguish the nature of the two cases.

Broken BT support in a Windows context generally means poor drivers for a given device - at least the Windows 10, which is almost 4 years old, has a stable BT stack. Therefore, BT problems are of particular (per-device) nature.

In Ubuntu, the problem is systemic, due to (even ignoring how terrible the BT protocol is) both Bluez's (alleged) terrible engineering practices, and Ubuntu's utter carelessness of the area. In this terms, BT problems are of universal nature.

For example, the 18.04 Pulseaudio/BT configuration is broken by default - see https://askubuntu.com/a/1050172.

This is not an exception; the Pulseaudio/BT configuration has been broken in a way or another since... forever. Very evidently, the Ubuntu devs prefer to ship a broken-but-up-to-date BT stack, than a working-but-old one.

For a more historical perspective of the Ubuntu/Bluez trainwreck, see http://www.bennybottema.com/2010/08/08/how-ubuntus-broken-bl.... Summary: "Bluez is a bunch of cowboy coders is why".