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Comment by renegade-otter | Hacker News Reader

I have an Alienware system and the Bluetooth on Windows is driving me insane. It's been a quarter century, Microsoft - get it to work.

Just yesterday I spent about 25 minutes and gave up. "Oh, so it's paired but there is no sound? I need to dig up that legacy settings window where I force the headphones to be the output device. Where did that thing go? It used to work. Hmmm... Let me try removing the device and then going into Sound settings and ADDING a new output device. It worked!"

A few seconds later it just disconnected again. Tried that like six times.

Overall, Windows enshitification has been hard and fast.

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This is the main reason I haven't upgraded my headset that included a USB dongle.

I've been trying to use my Google pixel buds and it's the same garbage experience you're mentioning. Random disconnects, output/input device swapping, and if you're using MS Teams or a video game that controls the devices it's a nightmare...

Well, to be fair, bluetooth is pretty shit on Linux as well. I've spent many hours over the last 10 years specifically tinkering with bluetooth on Linux. Admittedly, it's gotten better, but definitely not great.

The state of Bluetooth on Windows is just an absolute nightmare. My job is building a widget that streams realtime data over Bluetooth from a Windows system. It's so bad that we've totally given up on thr native Bluetooth drivers and are implementing our own stack with an external Bluetooth chip over USB.

If you build an application which scans for Bluetooth devices, the native windows Bluetooth pairing menu no longer functions. We have to stop our application before Windows will show or pair anything. Many functions just don't work, like some of the device descriptor messages. We had to do a thing where we connect to any device that appears to be ours and ask it what it is. If a device disconnects, windows takes up to 15 seconds to fire a disconnect event. There's no way to tell if a device is actually present, you just try to connect to it and catch the exception when it fails.

Windows also can't do Bluetooth audio sink and source simultaneously. On Windows 7 or any Linux distro since 2010 you cab play music on one device, pipe it into your computer and back out through a different bluetooth device.

It would be laughable if it weren't costing me money and sanity.

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