Bluetooth connection problems/mouse

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

Seeking tribal wisdom here…
Ok, so after several years of being annoyed with the draping cord of my mouse, I went back to a wireless mouse (my first bluetooth device btw) last year.
It’s great when it works, but sometimes (and I don’t know the rhyme or reason of it), I have to run ‘bluetoothctl; power on; scan on’ to make it actually find the mouse. The environment is KDE 6.3,3. Even when kde does find it, it does take a little while after bootup or sleep.

Anything I can do to make it more consistent and available? This is definitely a case in which to assume I’m five and know nothing, due to lack of bluetooth experience over the years.

Inxi snippets that might be useful:

Machine:
Type: Desktop System: ASRock product: A620M Pro RS WiFi v: N/A
serial:
Mobo: ASRock model: A620M Pro RS WiFi serial:
UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: 3.20 date: 02/21/2025
Bluetooth:
Device-1: MediaTek Wireless_Device driver: btusb type: USB
Report: btmgmt ID: hci0 state: up address: 74:97:79:EB:C4:10 bt-v: 5.2

2

This is a thread from someone having issues with bluetooth mouse. Maybe yours is similar.

3

It is possible, I had forgotten reading that thread this week, I’ll look over the links, though mine has been an issue for at least the last 18 months (so not tied to a particular release or even a distro). I have moments of just wanting to chuck it out the window and go buy another corded mouse!

4

Then probably unrelated.

With bluetooth and Linux, I haven’t generally had a great experience across different machines, distros, DEs… Finicky at best.

5

Well I guess I must be lucky then, because I’m using a BT mouse on both Eos (Logitech) as well as on Tumbleweed (HP) without much problems(knock on wood). At first I had some trouble with connecting the Logitech because I had forgotten to screw on the antennas to the connections of the motherboard :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:.

6

Mine works absolutely fine when it’s started, but just getting it started…lol, is somewhat like a creaky old car.

7

Are you using it on another distro or DE too ?

8

Yep, it’s on all my distros (it has three settings) and behaves similarly pretty much on each. I have cloned the id to most of them, though I am using all three across several distros.
Sadly…(yes it is sad) it seems to perform better in Windows (though I can’t say that definitely, because I haven’t spent significant time in Windows in over a year).
My gut instinct is that it has something to do far down in the bluetooth protocol with initial handshaking, but I could be completely wrong. I have nothing to support that really. I just looked through the journal output for bt (and not seeing anything about it), however I did note this from KDE during initial start:

Mar 19 13:54:23 garuda NetworkManager[817]: <info>  [1742410463.8812] Loaded device plugin: NMBluezManager (/usr/lib/NetworkManager/1.52.0-1/libnm-device-plugin-bluetooth.so)
Mar 19 13:54:39 garuda kded6[3952]: kf.bluezqt: PendingCall Error: "The name is not activatable"
Mar 19 13:54:40 garuda kdeconnectd[4204]: 2025-03-19T13:54:40 kdeconnect.core: No local bluetooth adapter found
9

Well that would explain a lot I would say, but what causes it I don´t know.
Have you already gone through the Arch wiki ?

10

Not for months (for this), but yes. I didn’t see anything that helped me, but I will go re-read now.

11

There could be some other device (wireless or BT) interfering with the signal I guess.
I’m afraid that is all the (minimal) knowledge I have at the moment.

12

I’ll follow the wiki’s advise to start bluetooth service in debug mode and see if I get anywhere with that.

13

Ok you never know if it will solve the problem.

14

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to debug what appears to be an intermittent issue :frowning:

15

Well I was searching the forum for topics about BT problems , and it looks like it seems to be a weak thing in Linux, maybe someone will chime in that has better knowledge about this.

16

Just a throw it out there idea, lots of times intermittent issues are race conditions (freak timings).

17

Don´t know anything about F1 racing :smiley:.
But reading about BT in the wikipedia, it seems to work with encrypted athentication, so anything can go wrong there I guess. One thing I noticed that in the BT configuration of the system settings , when I set it to enable BT after login , seems to work better than start with previous state. But don´t quote me on that.

18

I’ll try anything (that doesn’t require human sacrifice) :slight_smile:

1 Like
19

I’m also of the opinion that BT is too flaky when used in Linux. It also has been riddled with security holes, which can be exploited. BT is the first thing I always blacklist on a new install. Generally for wireless KB and mouse I use Logitech models with 2.4 GHz wireless (not bluetooth).

From my experiences providing BT support over the years I’d sum BT in Linux with:

BT is fine when it actually works.

BT often breaks on kernel updates.

BT sometimes breaks with driver/firmware updates.

It should have been named Blacktooth, as black magic is often required to keep it working properly.

I see you posted a Garuda output above. I likely didn’t notice your post there if you opened a help request @Garuda. Ping me there if you’d like, and I can give you some hands on help, (even though BT is anathema to me).

If you’d rather not do that, I can offer you several general tips here.

Bluetooth is often very dependent on a specific kernel for best operation. Test quite a few alternate kernels. An older, or newer experimental kernel will often work better if you’re having BT issues.

The BT adapter in use often greatly affects how BT performs in Linux. You didn’t post your specific BT model, but I see you’re using a Railink adapter. Many of the recent Railink adapters (BT & WiFi) have very poor Linux drivers. You may want to test an alternate BT adapter in case it is your adapter model that is causing your problem.

Good luck.

1 Like
20

That was kinda what I was afraid of. Mediatek comes on so many boards for Wireless and BT and it doesn’t perform that well (from my experiences either).