Arch Linux

millus

Member

Registered: 2019-07-21

Posts: 202

[DOWNGRADED] Latest updates broke Bluetooth

Hi, just wanting to notify whomever should know about it that recent pacman updates have broken Bluetooth. The applet disappeared from XFCE4 and even after I added it again it can connect to the headphones but will not transmit any sound or offer them as new device in pulse mixer, as if it wasn't connected at all.

Side note: The display brightness "on/off" key is still broken, this one was broken (along with darker/brighter keys which are now working again though) a couple weeks ago in pacman updates.

If anyone have information which packages to downgrade to fix all of this, would be very much appreciated!!

EDIT:

So I "solved" it by randomly downgrading all sorts of packages.

The packages that finally seemed to make the difference were the Pulseaudio ones, to:
pulseaudio-13.0-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
libpulse-13.0-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
If you use 32-bit libs for some reason you might also have to downgrade lib32-libpulse, to 13.0-1 (sept 2019).

Other packages I have downgraded but that didn't change anything until I downgraded Pulseaudio packages above were:
bluez-qt-5.75.0-1
linux-5.8.14.arch1-1 and linux-headers-5.8.14.arch1-1
linux-firmware-20200916.00a84c5-1

Unfortunately the laptop "screen on/off" toggle is still broken.

Really, I wonder how all these system-breaking things can go live. Does nobody test them before releasing them and breaking everyone's devices? Is there someone like "well I dont give a shit, let just have thousands of ppl spend hours of googling, forums or reddit to figure out how to fix it for them again"??

Last edited by millus (2020-10-12 11:24:32)

laloch

Member

Registered: 2010-02-04

Posts: 186

Re: [DOWNGRADED] Latest updates broke Bluetooth

Hi, just wanting to notify whomever should know about it that recent pacman updates have broken Bluetooth.
[...]
The packages that finally seemed to make the difference were the Pulseaudio ones, to:
pulseaudio-13.0-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
libpulse-13.0-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
If you use 32-bit libs for some reason you might also have to downgrade lib32-libpulse, to 13.0-1 (sept 2019).

I can confirm the issue. After today's upgrade v13.0 pinning does not help anymore.

Really, I wonder how all these system-breaking things can go live. Does nobody test them before releasing them and breaking everyone's devices? Is there someone like "well I dont give a shit, let just have thousands of ppl spend hours of googling, forums or reddit to figure out how to fix it for them again"??

Well, Arch Linux is a bleeding edge rolling release distro, so it's not really expected to be rock-stable, but in this case it's a bit over the edge. Pulseaudio v13.99 is in fact v14.0-beta - it's a development snapshot and it's broken in several ways. I can't really comprehend, how it could get out of testing. This is definitely a distribution bug.

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 1,978

Website

Re: [DOWNGRADED] Latest updates broke Bluetooth

I had a similar issue with my bluetooth headphones not being detected as a sound output device in pulseaudio.
In my case it helped to completely remove the device and then coupling it again.

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macro_rules! yolo { { $($tokens:tt)* } => { unsafe { $($tokens)* } }; }

GaKu999

Member

From: US/Eastern

Registered: 2020-06-21

Posts: 696

Re: [DOWNGRADED] Latest updates broke Bluetooth

I had a similar issue with my bluetooth headphones not being detected as a sound output device in pulseaudio.
In my case it helped to completely remove the device and then coupling it again.

Adding to this, sometimes after an update, a cold reboot is needed by my firmware, otherwise the adapter didn't work properly...and really cold reboot, like let the MB powered down for a minute at least...

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My repos • Some snippets

Heisenberg might have been here.