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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

I have one more which this article doesn't mention: Bluetooth. It's an extremely fragile house of cards (as far as I can figure, there are a few kernel modules, dbus, a bluetooth daemon and pulseaudio involved) and every upgrade you roll is extremely risky. Currently my BT works but after a day or so uptime it will simply stop working and nothing short of reboot helps. (More https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032 here)

And yes, I have been running Linux since before there was 1.0. And no, I don't like it. But the alternatives are even worse IMO.

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I constantly battle Bluetooth issues on every platform. It sucks and needs to die.

This is true even on my Mac with wireless Apple accessories. Pairing issues galore if I have to change the batteries.

The basic thing is that Bluetooth didn't start on a multi-user OS. It started on Ericsson mobile phones.

And there it was at first basically a way to do handsfree without a wire.

From that you have OBEX from IRDA added to handle various data transfers, and a concept of profiles that are half in hardware half in software.

In essence the very design jumps back and forth between kernel/hardware and user space.

Still, the place of failure i most often encounter is something getting stuck in dbus. Meaning that i can restart all the daemons, but unless i restart dbus shit all changes once a failure happens. But restarting dbus at best kills my desktop, at worst reboots the computer (hello systemd).

Bluetooth is a complete mess. Every new bluez version breaks backwards compatibility (all applications depending on it break!) and removes features.

Perhaps one of the major problems with bluetooth is it requires such a deep stack of confusing software which it's hard to find logs for when things are acting up.

For me, it turned out one piece of my stack had been set up by debian by default (or perhaps KDE's bluedevil?) to try and put uploaded files into a directory I didn't have permissions on. Leading to a near-silent error when trying to push files. Go figure.

I solved it and all of my wireless-networking issues by installing Intel wireless cards in all of my computers. Broadcom and Atheros have always given me problems.

Does Intel make USB bluetooth sticks? If my laptop didn't come with a combo miniPCIe card I doubt the necessary antenna is there. In a desktop, I looked for mPCIe - PCIe x1 adapters with lots of antennas but I can't really find any in low profile. So... how did you do that?

For desktop, perhaps the Gigabyte GC-WB867D-I?

Specs: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5157

Price: https://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-wireless-network-card...

It's basically an Intel 7260 Wireless-AC/Bluetooth chip plus a PCIe adapter.

Thanks! However, http://www.amazon.com/forum/-/Tx18X5FNV15HHU8/ref=ask_dp_dpm... it looks like this does not come with a low profile bracket. And, are two antennas ... enough? Just my 6300 in my laptop have three.

Intel has a desktop version and it comes with both brackets! http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/wireless-products/dua... http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Wireless-AC-Desktop-Network-7260... Also, I will be adding to a somewhat old HP SFF so I am using the single PCI slot to add an additional USB header (Rosewill RC-100). PCI speed is plenty for USB 2.0.

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