On Arch, my Bluetooth headphones are working great. MPOW-x3 and sony wh-1000xm4
My biggest gripe is that I can't use the microphone at the same time as the headphones, without switching to tin can mode.
My biggest gripe is that I can't use the microphone at the same time as the headphones, without switching to tin can mode.
And there are fixes at the protocol layer already, you just have to use nonstandard extensions. This is how airpods work.
If your going to do wireless on windows, either get a separate mic, use a corded headset, or a headset with a USB-wireless adapter unless you want it sounding like a tin can.
The headset modes haven’t appeared under Linux at all, which happens to suit me just fine, so I haven’t investigated the lack. A couple of times I’ve had issues with connecting at the BlueZ level, but putting the laptop to sleep and waking it up again has resolved it. (Just restarting bluetoothd doesn’t help.)
I was running PulseAudio for a few weeks, then I switched to PipeWire. I no longer get the Bluetooth indicator on it in waybar, but other than that the switch was fairly uneventful. One point is an improvement: it now seems to remember which devices I like to use, so that when I plug in my Yeti microphone it doesn’t switch audio output to it (it has a 3.5mm monitor port and can feed audio from the computer through that too), which it had always done under PulseAudio and I hadn’t yet gone to the trouble of figuring out how to stop it from doing that. One point in the Bluetooth device handling is potentially a slight regression: when silence should be being fed through the connection, I observe extremely quiet whine which I didn’t under PulseAudio. Not sure what’s at fault there.