openSUSE Tumbleweed and Sony WF-1000XM5/WH-1000XM5 Bluetooth Headphones

After my old Sol Republic earbuds died, all the headphones I daily drive are or have been made by Sony. This includes the WF-1000XM5 earbuds for going out and the WH-1000XM5 headphones I use on my desk or for plane travel.

While Sony headphones generally work well with Linux (I’m looking at you, Apple and Beats), I recently switched my Linux desktop and laptop back to openSUSE Tumbleweed from Fedora.

This came with one interesting problem: Sony Bluetooth headphones won’t connect from GNOME.

The good news is there is a way around it. Open a terminal and:

  1. Type in sudo systemctl start bluetooth and then sudo bluetoothctl

  2. Power on Bluetooth via power on

  3. Scan for devices via scan on

  4. Put the headphones in pairing mode, wait for them to come up and then grab the MAC

  5. Pair the headphones via pair <MAC>

  6. Quit bluetoothctl via quit. This is important otherwise we’d not be able to connect.

  7. Open sudo bluetoothctl and then type in connect <MAC>

After that, the Sony headphones should be connected via Bluetooth.

Source: André Sterba’s guide for Arch Linux, albeit with modifications.