Bluetooth & Linux, pain in the butt

I should just reiterate here that I work on Linux all the time (mainly Mint/Ubuntu), and use a cheap BCM20702 for my desktop (it shows as 0a5c:21ec via lsbusb), my laptop's built-in Intel bluetooth, or Raspberry Pi.

I give it a really bad time too because I'm continually connecting to hundreds of different BLE devices, then disconnecting, changing firmware and so on.

It all works great for me, and I moved to a new desktop with a brand new install of Mint last week which also worked right out the box. So I'd be careful about writing off all Linux devices as having bad Bluetooth LE support - my experience has been very different here.

I'm really surprised you two are having such big issues here.

Definitely worth:

• Trying Chrome instead of Chromium
  
• Don't pair with the Linux Bluetooth menu
  
• Just rebooting your PC, just in case. If that works then you can look at other ways of restarting just the relevant bit of the bluetooth stack - but I've found this isn't a big problem with any distribution I've used in the last few years