[themulticaster]

My personal Bluetooth experience also improved drastically when I finally got around properly importing the pairing keys from Windows into Linux. Now everything works flawlessly.

If anyone is dual-booting Linux and Windows, here's a gotcha to keep in mind: Bluetooth pairing works using keys associated the MAC address of a Bluetooth interface. If you pair a device on Windows (key A) and then try to pair/connect to the same device after booting into Linux (key B), it simply won't work without anything telling you the real reason: To the device it looks like someone is impersonating the host interface, since it was previously set up using key A, but suddenly someone (Linux) pretends to be the same host (MAC address still the same) but with key B. The solution is simply looking up the key in the Windows registry and then using the same key in Linux.

Unfortunately, the process is a little complicated, but the Arch wiki page [1] does a really good job of explaining this nowadays. I've previously tried to set this up a few years back, but it didn't really work. Perhaps the wiki page was expanded in the meantime, or I simply did something wrong back then.

Just posting this here hoping I might be able to help some people wondering why the hell some of their devices just don't want to connect on Linux.

By the way, AFAIK some devices just don't care about the keys, that's why you might only have issues with a subset of devices.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth#Dual_boot_pairing