Manjaro Xfce Bluetooth Problem

Sep 29, 2017

Bluetooth recognition - at least on Manjaro Xfce - has been erratic and inconsistent.

For no clear reason the LTS kernel and even a newer kernel have identified the hardware, while it has failed to do so in a great many occasions.

Many of the tweaks included reinstalling bluez, bluez-firmware, bluez-libs, bluez-tools, and bluez-utils.

Back to the drawing room and back again.

The bluetooth adapters were not being recognized however. And after logging out and back into the session, and even after sudo /sbin/shutdown -r now, nothing seemed to work.

The following day - to my surprise - I booted the system and it picked the bluetooth adapters without a problem.

It reminded me of a comment on the manjaro forum thread entitled Bluetooth adapters app not opening Bluetooth Manager in which one of the participants said:

Bluetooth support in Linux is always troublesome, even in Windows, smartphone, etc. So yeah, I think staying away from bluetooth related hardwares if you want a trouble free experience. Wireless hardwares nowadays are going towards a dedicated receiver way to handle wireless connection and that’s a better approach. Just my two cents ¹

I have to agree with him on that regard.

On the other hand, the desktop environment KDE hasn’t - I ran it for a short while and perhaps my feedback is worthless of consideration on that regard - given me the same problems than the current configuration under xfce.

But I never thought that the problems would persist even after the installation of a newer kernel. That is perhaps the main reason which has been drifting me away from xfce until further notice.

And while KDE-fanboys have come up with the slogan that it grows on you, xfce is perhaps a more GNU/Linux-centric configurable environment than the former. I still enjoy tweaking with its features even though its less polished than Plasma KDE. There is no question about this. KDE aims at the latest hardware, while xfce focuses on the rest. I’ve never tried to benchmark its memory and CPU consumption, but I’m almost certain it fairs much better than KDE.

Whether xfce will be a daily desktop environment driver running the main programs on which my workflow depends upon, it’s a question of time and how well it will handle them without a major setback.

Further oversights around Bluetooth vulnerabilities include technical papers such as Security Risks in Bluetooth Devices, Bluetooth security threats and solutions

Even recent articles from Slashdot - BlueBorne Vulnerabilities Impact Over 5 Billion Bluetooth-Enabled Devices have gone on at length about it. The following paper - although unreliable since it looks more than a pamphlet from a company that advertises its products under the pretension of providing unparalleled protection - serves to confirm that regardless of its merit [this paper itsel] is worth considering the possible risks could arise as a result from the operations of bluetooth devices.

References

bluetooth adapters not opening bluetooth-manager-bluez-failed_↩︎