I switched from Mint to Debian recently and it’s been great so far. I’m still getting used to the idea of no “panel” (tasks bar), but I think I will keep it that way since it looks cleaner. I find it really easy to navigate with just keyboard shortcuts. It does really feel universal.
Only issue that keeps bugging me is that for some reason the sound quality on any Bluetooth device is trash. €100 headset sounds like a €10 one. An issue I didn’t have with Mint, Ubuntu or Windows. I haven’t had time to investigate it yet though, maybe something is missing in the default installation and is just a matter of installing the right package.
I never actually had to deal with Bluetooth issues on Linux so take this with a grain of salt.
BT audio devices generally support multiple different encodings, for example aptX, but they can always fall back to the most basic and most horrible codec that is universally supported on any BT host device. Sounds like that’s what’s happening. So you might want to look into why your PC isn’t using the better options.
Yes, I thought it might be a code issue. It just seemed weird that with other Debian based distros (ubuntu and mint) I have never had this issue. I hope this weekend I get enough free time to investigate further. Thank you for the tip.
Maybe the necessary codecs just aren’t installed in Debian by default? Mint and Ubuntu are targeted at laptops for general use, so it makes sense they’d bundle all Bluetooth codecs in a default installation to be ready for most users. But Debian makes fewer assumptions like that, and is often used for servers, so perhaps they didn’t want to bloat it with codecs that many installations will never need.
I’m just guessing here, but that makes sense to me.
Yeah, I know, but as I said I kind of like it and I think I can get used to it. It’s not necessarily something wrong with Debian, it’s just that I have been a long time windows user, and then used mint also for a long time, so this is just a habit.
I switched from Mint to Debian recently and it’s been great so far. I’m still getting used to the idea of no “panel” (tasks bar), but I think I will keep it that way since it looks cleaner. I find it really easy to navigate with just keyboard shortcuts. It does really feel universal.
Only issue that keeps bugging me is that for some reason the sound quality on any Bluetooth device is trash. €100 headset sounds like a €10 one. An issue I didn’t have with Mint, Ubuntu or Windows. I haven’t had time to investigate it yet though, maybe something is missing in the default installation and is just a matter of installing the right package.
I’m using Debian/Plasma and I have a task bar. Maybe it’s optional or depends on environment?
Now you’re making me think I should get rid of my task bar…
I never actually had to deal with Bluetooth issues on Linux so take this with a grain of salt.
BT audio devices generally support multiple different encodings, for example aptX, but they can always fall back to the most basic and most horrible codec that is universally supported on any BT host device. Sounds like that’s what’s happening. So you might want to look into why your PC isn’t using the better options.
Yes, I thought it might be a code issue. It just seemed weird that with other Debian based distros (ubuntu and mint) I have never had this issue. I hope this weekend I get enough free time to investigate further. Thank you for the tip.
Maybe the necessary codecs just aren’t installed in Debian by default? Mint and Ubuntu are targeted at laptops for general use, so it makes sense they’d bundle all Bluetooth codecs in a default installation to be ready for most users. But Debian makes fewer assumptions like that, and is often used for servers, so perhaps they didn’t want to bloat it with codecs that many installations will never need.
I’m just guessing here, but that makes sense to me.
You could also install any de on top of debian(for example cinnamon if you liked mint or KDE). Even parallel if you like
Or if you don’t want to uninstall and install a bunch of packages there are official flavors of debian https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/
There’s also just LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition)
Yeah, I know, but as I said I kind of like it and I think I can get used to it. It’s not necessarily something wrong with Debian, it’s just that I have been a long time windows user, and then used mint also for a long time, so this is just a habit.
It’s probably just using the call profile for everything.
https://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser/a2dp
This is probably what you’d want to start with. Mint and Ubuntu are probably handling the switch automatically.
Thank you for the suggestion, it might be this. I haven’t had a lot of free time lately, but I hope this weekend I can sit down and investigate.