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If you try to connect Apple AirPods to a computer running Debian, you will be able to pair them without any issues, but unfortunately you will not be able to use them to play any sounds. When I tried to do this, after pairing the AirPods, clicking on the Sound Settings menu option in the Bluetooth settings only showed the default output as an option.

In order to use AirPods to play sound you need to tweak the Bluetooth configuration file a bit. I poked around in that file a bit but I have no idea what the difference between “le” and “br/edr” was until I read this other stack overflow post which explained it succinctly.

For whatever reason, it looks like AirPods are only able to operate in BR/EDR mode. To get them to work with your Debian computer you should do the following:

1. Edit /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and update the ControllerMode to equal bredr, by default it is set to dual mode.
2. Restart the Bluetooth service with sudo systemctl restart bluetooth.
3. You should now see your AirPods as an output option in the Sound Settings (screenshot shown below).

I am not 100% sure what the impact of disabling dual mode will be, but for now all of my other Bluetooth devices along with the AirPods work without any issues.

Update:

After a couple days of using Airpods with my Debian laptop, I’ve noticed that every once in a while they stop showing up in the sound settings menu. This bug is a bit annoying, but if you restart the bluetooth service with sudo systemctl restart bluetooth.service then they will begin to work again. In addition, I still have not figured out how to get the airpods to be an input source.

A few days ago, a critical bug was found in Firefox that disabled all extensions due to an expiring intermediate certificate. This caused a lot of outrage on the internet, and an inconvenience for most users.

I run firefox-esr on Debian testing. I only use a handful of extensions, and the only that I really can’t live without is 1Password X. Luckily, for the few days where this was broken I was able to get access to all of my passwords by logging into 1Password.com.

The Firefox team did a great job in communicating the issue, and keeping the community up to date on their blog. I wanted to take a moment to give a huge thank you to the Maintainers of Mozilla-related packages team on Debian for getting the firefox-esr package updated less than a day after the patch was released.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a new version this morning, and upgrading firefox-esr on Debian testing fixed the issue with extensions as soon as I restarted.

I’m running Debian Testing on a laptop, and I would like to disable Wayland because not all of the tools that I use currently have first-class support for it. There is an old post that I used to reference to get this to work, but it appears that gdm3 changed the naming conventions for the configuration file in a newer version.

There used to be a file called /etc/gdm3/custom.conf which appears to have been renamed to /etc/gdm3/daemon.conf in newer versions of Debian. Luckily the contents of this file are more or less the same.

# GDM configuration storage
#
# See /usr/share/gdm/gdm.schemas for a list of available options.

[daemon]
# Uncomment the line below to force the login screen to use Xorg
#WaylandEnable=false

# Enabling automatic login
# AutomaticLoginEnable = true
# AutomaticLogin = user1

# Enabling timed login
# TimedLoginEnable = true
# TimedLogin = user1
# TimedLoginDelay = 10

[security]

[xdmcp]

[chooser]

[debug]
# Uncomment the line below to turn on debugging
# More verbose logs
# Additionally lets the X server dump core if it crashes
#Enable=true

In order to disable Wayland and switch back to X11, you should uncomment #WaylandEnable=flalse in this configuration file and restart your computer to apply the changes.