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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

I love my Steam Deck but about every other time I use it I’m reminded it’s Desktop Linux.

For example my Bluetooth headphones will gradually lose connection over a play session and start cracking before finally going silent. Sometimes a game won’t start until I reboot the system. The on screen keyboard sometimes doesn’t show up when it’s needed, or shows up when it’s not needed. Games crash more frequently compared to other systems.

Even sleep - feature everyone is raving about - doesn’t work perfectly like it does on Nintendo Switch or PlayStation. Sometimes games come back from sleep without sound, or at 15 fps until I quit and relaunch.

It definitely feels more shaky and less polished than a Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, or iPhone. I still love it, but don’t expect that level of quality from it.

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It's much more reliable to use a usb bluetooth audio dongle instead of connecting your bluetooth headphones directly for gaming. During a gaming session, the bluetooth stack might be cpu-starved and starts to stutter or even lose connection. A usb bluetooth audio dongle is detected as an external audio device (mic and speaker) by linux which will bypass this issue entirely, and usually has lower latency codex support as well (I have a hard time getting aptx working on linux). You then connect your bluetooth headphones to the dongle (usually by putting your headphone in pairing mode, then pressing a button in the dongle, and it'll automatically connect to it) instead of your pc.

Good to know, but this is just an example of the issues OP described; needing yet another workaround instead.

"There are no LinuxPods, and if there were, I doubt they'd go in your ears."

It's a workaround that demonstrates how Bluetooth, and especially BT audio, are still "hard". So much so, that a company designed and built a proprietary product and tech stack whose entire acclaim is that its Bluetooth audio works reasonably well.

And even owning the entire stack, Apple can't make it perfect. In Mac Minis at least up to 2019, because of the BT radio's proximity to the USB traces, interference from communication rates when certain USB devices are attached causes the BT peripherals to fail. And I don't mean when the rare noisy 2.4GHz product is attached, I mean USB 2.0 mass storage devices, printers, and more that otherwise work perfectly well cause Magic Mice and Keyboards to completely not respond or else have mere inches of laggy range. You can forget BT audio in those cases.

There's no beating radio physics, so our engineering solution was to add Bluetooth dongles on USB extenders to a few dozen Mac Mini installations.

BT sucks, but it's what we have.

had a lot of issues with magic keyboard & trackpad, plenty of times they just disconnected, not to mention apple still doesn't show the battery level for a lot of BT devices.

after switching to linux, BT has the same issues just multiplied because now there is N vendors with each having their own quirks.

I was just reading your comment when my BT headphones disconnected from the USB BT dongle and had to restart the BT service, what a timing haha

I don't think it's fair to expect that level of quality... yet. You've named 3 companies that have been making related devices for literally decades. Valve... hasn't :P

Certainly it's fair to mention it, though. As a person who has never used a Steam Deck, reading about these experiences alongside the positive ones helps paint a fuller picture for me.

GNOME and KDE have been doing Linux desktops since the 1990s, "literally decades". At Microsoft and Apple there are evidently product managers incentivized to ensure bluetooth earbuds "just work" and do not hang the bluetooth settings app. Apple has sold more than 150M AirPods, has over $12B revenue from them, and would lose a lot of profit if they don't "just work". Core desktop Linux devs on the other hand be like, "Whatev.. I don't use bluetooth on my 24-core BeastStation. Not my problem." They have the brains and talent to make it work, but not the motivation. Open source people work on what they find interesting.

> Core desktop Linux devs on the other hand be like, "Whatev.. I don't use bluetooth on my 24-core BeastStation. Not my problem."

This is absolutely not how Linux development works, but okay.

Very true. They use 10-15 year old ThinkPads.

Are you sure? Maybe it's not how kernel dev works but the issues aren't usually in the kernel, they're in daemons and GUIs sometimes made by small groups.

Sometimes Bluetooth hangs on Windows11 so it's on par

Some days my Mac decides it hates my Bluetooth mouse, so I have to use the Logitech dongle.

It seems about on par with MacOS.

no offense but to expect audio to work via bluetooth seems like a reasonable and prudent expectation. little portable bluetooth speakers for 10-20 bucks from aliexpress work seemlesly.

Ubuntu on a regular desktop, with the exception of sleep and resume, is a similar level of polish to a console. Good enough to change my mind about ditching Linux.

If they hadn't gone with Arch, I wonder where they would be? I could imagine some other company doing an Ubuntu console. Maybe they could even convince Canonical to open up the Snap backend a bit and let them do their own servers, of they could just implement their own from scratch.

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