Bone-conduction headset

[Daniel van Vugt]

After Ubuntu 22.04 was released, the flow of Bluetooth bugs being reported 
slowed way down, which is encouraging.

Also "headphone connects but the microphone doesn't" was a feature of the 
original Bluetooth spec because it only supported microphone usage in ultra-low 
quality mode, which may have not been the default mode for that reason. Hence 
you would have no microphone.

More modern Bluetooth profiles that support reasonable output quality 
simultaneously with microphone input were only possible when we reached 
(approximately):

  BlueZ >= 5.54 +
  Kernel >= 5.6 +
  PulseAudio >= 15.0

Ubuntu 22.04 is the only currently supported release with all of that.


On 17/7/22 10:17 pm, Peter Flynn wrote:
> Does anyone have a recommendation for a lightweight Bluetooth bone-conduction 
> headset with boom microphone that actually works under Linux?
> 
> Every single regular headset I have tried either
> 
>   * fails to connect to Bluetooth OR
>   * connects but then dies OR
>   * the headphone connects but the microphone doesn't OR
>   * connects but fails to pass the connection to ALSA so it never appears
> 
> (currently on Mint 20.1 with whatever Bluetooth comes as standard).
> 
> I know Bluetooth is flaky as hell, and that Linux implementations needs 
> extensive tweaking and testing with various combinations of packages to get to 
> work, but surely by 2022 we should have a system that just works?
> 
> Or a recommendation for one of the Ubuntu-based distros with a fully-working 
> Bluetooth system?
> 
> Peter
>