Tag: Bluetooth

How to Display Battery Percentage for Bluetooth Headphones in GNOME

By default, the Power tab in GNOME’s Settings does not show the battery percentage for Bluetooth headphones like the Sony WH-1000XM3. However, you can enable this feature by activating the DBUS interface of Bluez, the Linux Bluetooth protocol stack. The DBUS interface is hidden behind the --experimental flag for the Bluez service. To enable it, follow these steps:

  1. Create an override file for the bluetooth service:
$ sudo systemctl edit bluetooth

This command will create the file /etc/systemd/system/bluetooth.service.d/override.conf.

  1. Add the following lines to the file:
[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/libexec/bluetooth/bluetoothd --experimental

Note that both ExecStart= lines are required.

  1. Restart the Bluetooth service.
Battery percentage for Sony WH-1000XM3 under Settings->Power

Downgrade PipeWire 0.3.39 to 0.3.38

PipeWire 0.3.39 on Debian deprecates pipewire-media-session in favor of WirePlumber. The main issue I found with the new version is that it doesn’t support Bluetooth profile autoswitching, as it is unimplemented in WirePlumber. The best solution until this is resolved is simply holding back upgrading to 0.3.39. If you already upgraded, downgrading is a bit of hassle.

The first step is to retrieve all the necessary packages in the last working version, which is 0.3.38-2.

$ cd `mktemp -d`
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . gstreamer1.0-pipewire 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libpipewire-0.3-0 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a all --binary -d . libpipewire-0.3-common 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libpipewire-0.3-modules 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-audio-client-libraries 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-bin 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-pulse 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . pipewire-media-session 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libspa-0.2-modules 0.3.38-2
$ debsnap -a amd64 --binary -d . libspa-0.2-bluetooth 0.3.38-2

Install all the retrieved packages and mark some of the packages back as automatically installed.

$ sudo apt install ./*.deb
$ sudo apt-mark auto gstreamer1.0-pipewire libpipewire-0.3-0 libpipewire-0.3-common libpipewire-0.3-modules pipewire-bin pipewire libspa-0.2-modules

Mark pipewire-media-session as held so it won’t get accidentally removed again.

$ sudo apt-mark hold pipewire-media-session

Finally, restart PipeWire.

$ systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse