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
Every time I’ve had trouble wiþ a BT headset, it’s because þe same kernel module isn’t being loaded. And every time it happens, it takes me an hour to re-learn which one it is. btusb? hci_usb? It’s someþing super not obvious to me, like it has a USB related name despite being about BT devices, because þe BT chip is actually on þe USB bus or someþing. hci_usb? hci_core?
Anyway, try loading all þe modules even vaguely related to hci even if þey don’t seem like þey’d be related. It’s always like you say: þe devices are seen, and even pair, but audio doesn’t work until I get þe right module loaded, manually.
Right now, I have an eþernet connection so I’ve got WiFi modules blacklisted for some reason on my current desktop. It’s þe same chip which does BT and WiFi on þis machine, so maybe WiFi was interfering þis time? I can’t þink why else I’d have blacklisted it.
Sorry, my memory is highly selective, but I hope it’s a useful lead.
Happened to me with another brand and model (can’t recall which to be honest). It did pair but appeared as a generic BT device, not headphones, and thus was totally useless.
I was pissed.
Then… I pair with something else, not a computer but something simpler, maybe a phone, I can’t remember, and it worked. So I was shocked, how can for this it works, clearly no driver installed on top and not my desktop?!
Anyway long story short I tried again few more times and it worked. Headphones were now pairing as headphones.
I can’t explain why but my point is, I wouldn’t give up. I would retry to pair few times (I know, sounds ridiculous, and yet…) without changing anything.
PS: if you know the ins and outs of the BT stack and it makes sense to you, please do explain! I’d love to learn
I did that too, and I did it a lot of times. I uninstalled and reinstalled all the Bluetooth packages (BlueZ, PipeWire, and WirePlumber). Then I started the Bluetooth service manually from the terminal and paired the device through bluetoothctl, cleared the cache in /var/lib/bluetooth, and re-paired from scratch on different distros.
Still no luck, 🤷♂️ it connects every time, but it never shows up as a headset.
Make sure to properly reset the devices, both BT on desktop, not just unpair but removing past pairings, and headsets.
Also try pairing with something else, e.g. mobile.
Unfortunately as I don’t know why it worked I can’t help more than that, best of luck.
Do the headphones have some kind of multi device connect function? Try turning it off as it likes to mess with unsupported devices. Also do the headphones support SBC or just proprietary codecs.
Try Fedora which mostly have lastest kernel and drivers
I feel the pain bro, I have airpods and when I connect them they just follow this connect and disconnect loop. So I can’t use them on Linux but with my android device and on windows they work fine.
Not this headset but another sound device (maybe MS headset) I needed to install pavucontrol, open it and go to playback options and click around, and the device popped up in the DE sound switcher
Try installing Blueman.
My Airpods didn’t want to connect, but with blueman they finally did!
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.
You dont need to test on different Linux distributions. All that matters is what kernel its running. That is the one that is detecting your headset.
Just so you know for the future. You can actually just install the latest kernel instead of trying different distros.
I have the same model, working in arch (swaywm, pipewire). For me was just connecting by Bluetooth, open pavucontrol and select the driver (high fidelity playback for when listening, headset for online meetings). No problems at all out of the box.
So just try pavucontrol, it allows you to choose the driver and use it as headset
I use my WF-1000XM5 on Linux fine, paired normally IIRC. Any reason your set would be different?
Bluetooth headset are quite problematic in Linux due to missing drivers, codecs and/or firmware. As an output device they tend to work but I’ve never gotten microphone functionality working on my WH-1000XM3.
I’m having issues getting the microphone on my sony headphones to work on my steam deck. I was figuring it is due to missing drivers as well
I had Sony CH-WH710n and no major problems.
Try to pair the headphones via
bluetoothctland see if there are any errors in the logs.Do you dual boot windows? In my case it couldn’t pair to both at the same time without extracting the keys.
I would try to see if windows pairs up with the headphones, after all other troubleshooting steps are exhausted.
I have it working on Ubuntu 25.10 and it worked out of the box for me. So I’m not sure if they added the drivers for experimental releases of Ubuntu or I had them unknowingly installed somehow. Therefore, no idea what to tell you other than try Ubuntu 25.10?
