I am one of those poor bastards that had a hell of a time getting my Airpods working with Linux. Searches led me to going to /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and changing ControllerMode to “bredr”. This got the AirPods working, but then my bt keyboard and mouse wouldn’t connect.
What I wound up doing was switching ControllerMode to bredr, connecting the airpods, then switching ControllerMode back to “dual”. That kept them connected and allowed other devices to also connect.
So, now I’m sharing this for other poor bastards like me who could t get them to work with the steps that are out there.
This worked in Fedora 38 and will be testing with Ubuntu 23.04 and maybe arch today.
Using a bluetooth audio adapter actually has really great advantage for some circumstances, e.g. gaming. Many bluetooth audio adapters support low latency codecs (aptX) which greatly reduce audio lag, and when your CPU is at 100% usage while playing some demanding games, your bluetooth audio won’t freeze or stutter due to the encoder process getting starved out of cpu time.