Up until recently, autoconnect for at least KDE worked. I do not recall if I needed to edit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf but noe setting AutoEnable to 1 doesn’t even work at all. I’ve tried on both XFCE and KDE, yet GNOME Shell doesn’t exhibit this problem.
I have no idea when this started becoming an issue, probably 1.5 to 2 months ago. Somewhere in that range. I find I have similar issues on Arch-based desktops as well in spite of following the Arch wiki for supposedly resolving Bluetooth issues.
What’s a user who really doesn’t want anything to do with GNOME can do? I am baffled beyond belief about this problem and I do not know where to begin with a resolution.
Clarificartion: The stack which comes with GNOME Shell works with my hardware out of the box but for some reason recently, BlueZ decided to have a little hiccup and elect to not work at the display manager. This applies to both XFCE and KDE as I spent the time to download the latest builds of those variants and install them. I set true AutoEnable with no joy for either of them.
I have no idea what to do — I am lost. Short of attempting to uninstall and reinstall the whole stack, what else can I do?
What else am I suppose to do How can I check if SDDM is working with Bluetooth service? I’m also too tired for proper troubleshooting, I’ll commit some more research later.
Is there a reason using bluetooth keyboard at the login screen without any user intervention had been disabled recently? Because I’ve lost the capability to do that.
See that doesn’t work for me. And I have no idea why. I can smash this keyboard as much as I want at the login screen but I receive no joy until I use either the built-in laptop or a USB laptop to log in, which would be absolutely no good if the built-in keyboard decided to (or was forced due to malfunction) not work.
I think this honestly has something to do with BlueZ because I get the same issue with Arch “Proper” (or as close as I could with another Arch distro). I should attempt with a fresh install on an external device.
I already made a thread about it in Support / Network but that’s cool I suppose you could move those posts here as well, or visa-versa.
So the extra research I did before going to bed was installing all of the mainline builds fresh and ths issue affects XFCE as well, which also means it likely affects MATE, Budgie, probably Deepin and so-on but i hadn’t tested those.
What worked surprised me — GNOME Shell. So something is messed up with the Bluetooth stack somewhere for me to suddenly lose this capability of using a Bluetooth keyboard at the display manager.
I tried 5.10. Kernel isn’t the issue. GNOME Shell install has 5.15 as kernel. I was able to use 5.15 with my bluetooth keyboard at the display manager before. I do not understand.
Also, I used bluetoothctl to establish the connection. No dice still, so it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with KDE’s tools. I mean — the keyboard works. I can pair, connect and use it, it’s only at the display manager for KDE and XFCE where it does not work.
So it has to be a stack issue, or some underlying display manager dependency that has become messed up with time which causes it to not play nice with bluez or systemd out of the box where the display manager doesn’t permit Bluetooth input.
Just to remind all: I am having these issues with a fresh install. I have an older install I can check out since I tend to just play with USB stuff randomly and forget about it.
Thhe one instance I mentioned earlier is now absolutely busted with a bad superblock issue I cannot resolve. But before I messed it up trying to duplicate it in KDE Partition Manager I managed to test successfully connecting a Bluetooth device with the laptop, then signing in with the Bluetooth device.
But now I have an even more interesting issue; no matter how far back I go (I am using a build from 2020 asI write this) I cannot get the device to work in KDE. I presume the same thing will happen in XFCE. I had not updated any packages yet.
I booted into Windows recently and updated some software there. Could it be that an update in Windows replaced / upgraded the firmware of my multi-purpose radio and somehow busted this capability? don’t know what else it could be. Scratch that, things were working before as well. And yes I set autoenable to true.
I am losing my God-damn mind here because stuff I figured would work isn’t working now and I am just angry about the whole thing.
I am happy to say I had solved the problem. My only disappointment, aside from the hardship I had endured frgetting this, was the affirmation and fulfillment of bets that I was being a retard.
I forgot to decomment the AutoEnable line. I wrote about that, in this very forum bur forgot about it. Not that I already doubted my reduced mental capacity, but this puts into question if I am a competent human being with any right to profess technical merit when I’m forgetting the basics akin to someone suffering from dementia.