I am one of those poor bastards that had a hell of a time getting my Airpods working with Linux. Searches led me to going to /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and changing ControllerMode to “bredr”. This got the AirPods working, but then my bt keyboard and mouse wouldn’t connect.
What I wound up doing was switching ControllerMode to bredr, connecting the airpods, then switching ControllerMode back to “dual”. That kept them connected and allowed other devices to also connect.
So, now I’m sharing this for other poor bastards like me who could t get them to work with the steps that are out there.
This worked in Fedora 38 and will be testing with Ubuntu 23.04 and maybe arch today.
Man, I guess I’m lucky mine connected without any issues right after installing F38.
Both AirPods 1st gen and AirPods Max worked for me perfectly fine without any tweaks. Maybe it’s an issue with your Bluetooth adapter?
I’ve read this can depend a lot on the bluetooth card. Personally after replacing my cheapo dongle from like 2012 that probably just didn’t do a recent enough BT version I didn’t have any issues connecting to them.
What card do you have? Might be useful for anyone else who has the same issue.
Got no issues with AirPods Pro and arch. Installed blueman and it’s dependencies and it connected just fine. Managed to configure pipewire to automatically switch between a2dp sink and hsp depending on the current usage.
I haven’t had any problem on Garuda with my AirPods. I saw another guy say he had no problems with manjaro and arch. I didn’t know people were having problems on other distros or setups.
