I’ve been fighting with my Sony WF-C510 for days.
I’ve tried it on Ubuntu, Debian, and Linux Mint. Same result every time: It connects successfully, but never shows up as an audio output device.
I even bought a USB Bluetooth dongle, thinking my laptop’s chipset was the problem… but nope. It still connects as a device, not a headset.
I’ve restarted Bluetooth services, switched from PulseAudio to PipeWire, and tried every “set-card-profile” trick from AI and forums, but nothing works.
Has anyone actually managed to get a Sony WF-C510 working properly on Linux?
It’s clear this is purely Sony’s fault for not caring about or supporting Linux drivers. Are they just ignoring the entire platform at this point?
Any workaround or success story would save my sanity.
Distros Tested: Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 12-13, Mint 22 Issue: Connects, but no A2DP/HSP profile visible
Could be due to device profiles. Maybe they need some OS support.
+1 to this. Lots of talk in this thread about drivers, but the only driver involved here is the Bluetooth driver. Half of the point of Bluetooth is that peripherals don’t need their own drivers, they just provide various profiles which are standardized so the Bluetooth service can consume those profiles from any device.
Not an expert in this area but I believe the implementation of most of those profiles is user space, so the proper place to be debugging is the Bluetooth service or in pulsesudio. So start your Bluetooth service logs they might give you some idea as to what is going on. Try to get a list of what profiles are supported by your OS and what profiles are supported by the device, maybe the device only supports some newer lossless profile that hasn’t been implemented in Linux yet.
I wrote that because I had continuous problems with a specific Bluetooth headset on my Sailfish OS phone, and the headset had no problems with my gf’s iPhone. What was interesting was that Linux did not recognize it correctly. After a Sailfish update, the problem went away. Can of course be still a driver problem, but the Bluetooth drivers are of course specific to the general Linux kernel, not to Sailfish.