Implementing Bluetooth LE Audio and Auracast on Linux Systems | Hacker News Reader

Implementing Bluetooth LE Audio and Auracast on Linux Systems

collabora.com

147 pointslosgehts13 comments

I commend Collabora's tremendous work on Bluetooth LE audio on Linux and their work in general, but I can't help being frustrated that it's volunteer contributors handling the implementation, while the Bluetooth Special Interest Group makes a ton of profit by licensing Bluetooth yet contributes nothing to implementing the standard on Linux. It's really typical of the "open source" spirit: volunteers are exploited, and the fruits of their labor are harvested as profit.

It would help if BlueZ had any hope of being commercially relevant. The Linux Wi-Fi stack, in contrast, is quite usable.

You'd be surprised who many products ship with BlueZ, it's everywhere in all kinds of embedded systems, much like the Linux Wi-Fi stack.

If BlueZ was compelling enough, Android would tolerate it for the same reasons it tolerates the kernel. Nobody really wants to be in the business of writing a BT stack, and yet Android has replaced theirs at least twice. I ask, why?

>On Linux, LE Audio support is implemented through BlueZ for the Bluetooth® host stack and PipeWire for audio routing.

Most Linux systems support Bluetooth LEA via Gabeldorsche. Google shipped LEA support in Android 14 and BSP providers offered the drivers needed for it in their Android 14 BSPs.

This Gabeldorsche is really only for Android. BlueZ is used almost everywhere else.

Most Linux installs that use Bluetooth with Linux are Android installs.

Apart from basically every laptop sold in the last 20 years, yeah

Android is really its own platform that happens to use the Linux kernel as a shortcut.

What we're talking about here is really what used to be called GNU/Linux, so the whole platform that is based on the software developed by the various communities.

I think this is needless gatekeeping. Does it matter if someone uses KDE or GNOME? Systemd or openrc? Musl or glibc? They are all part of the Linux community.

I use GrapheneOS for my smartphone and Fedora for my workstation and I consider both to be linux distributions

Most Linux laptops are Chromebooks which ship with Android's previous Bluetooth stack (still not BlueZ).

This is a big pain point for wireless headsets. Thanks for the post and linux overview of the progress.

This:

If you've ever wondered why your music quality drops dramatically when you answer a call on your Bluetooth® headset, you've experienced one of A2DP's key limitations firsthand.

Made me feel old ... how are people listening to music while taking a call?

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