Bluetooth Adapter Not Found

[Agent Spydre]

After a recent update from the Stable channel, I have discovered that my Steam Deck's Bluetooth settings are now completely missing from the settings menu. I have tried restarting my Steam Deck several times and switching between System Update channels (Stable to Beta to Preview back to Stable). Nothing brings the option back on the menu.

Finally, I went into desktop mode to check the settings there, but it is saying that the Bluetooth Adapter is not found.
Ordinarily, on a windows machine, when something like this happens, this is where I would have options to go to my device manager, refresh and look for any lost/unrecognized hardware listings, reinstall drivers, reset the adapter, etc. etc.
Sadly, I'm not very well-versed enough with Linux to know how to do anything like that here and every resource I have found on my own has been largely convoluted and unhelpful.

Can anyone tell me, in simple layman's terms, what I can do to try and get the Steam Deck to see the bluetooth adapter and get it working again?
I'm down to doing a factory reset now and I would really like to avoid doing that if possible.

Thanks.

[Aria]

Same thing happened to me. Both my Wifi and Bluetooth are gone.
I tried the battery storage mode thing, reinstalled Steam OS, turned on/off the power management for wifi. Non of them worked. Did looked into desktop mode and typed "lsmod | grep 88" DID NOT see RT88 or any network interface.

[Agent Spydre]

Dang.
This is what I mean, though......where did you type that command? What does it do?
Everywhere I look, there's an entirely different command/code string just to get Linux to even *look* for a device depending what version you have. There's a different one for Ubuntu, for Fedora, whatever the heck "Mint Cinnamon" is......

I just want to know if my bluetooth is busted.....

[WarnerCK]

Can't help with broken Bluetooth, but:

Originally posted by Agent Spydre:

where did you type that command?

In your terminal application, which in KDE is called Konsole.

What does it do?

lsmod lists (ls is the command to list the contents of a directory) the kernel modules that are in use. The pipe | takes the output of one command and feeds it into the input of another. grep searches through text for a text string that you've given it, and returns lines that contain that string.

[cyclopibus]

Hello,

Just to add to the discussion, on your Linux system (SteamOS) a lot of things are managed with systemd.

If you want some information quickly on your system you can, for example, run the command

 systemctl 

In the output, you will see the list of devices (everything that ends with a .device), the list of your services (everything that ends with a .service), and more.

If you want more information on a specific element of this list, you can then run the command

 systemctl status <element> 

For example, let's say we want more information on the Bluetooth service, we can run the command

 systemctl status bluetooth.service 

I'm not an expert in Linux, but I hope that with these additional pieces of information you will be able to find a solution to your problem.

One last thing, systemctl is a big thing that offers a lot of commands, some of them can have an impact / modify your system, so be sure to know what you are doing before running them. The commands I listed above will not change anything and will just return some information.

[SolarBabies]

Mine is also saying Bluetooth Adapter not found after the mouse was lagging last time it connected a week ago. After the last update now it also weirdly makes me select the OS version on bootup, & spits out a bunch of system logs during startup before the startup movie plays. Does Steam Deck just have faulty Bluetooth ??

[Tenteddonk]

w

[iFuzzle]

Push on this, any one found a solution? Did you send it to Valve?

[Agent Spydre]

I didn't bother sending it back to Valve.
In the intervening months, following some more system updates, the issue seems to have cleared up on its own and the Steam Deck can see and use its bluetooth adapter again.

Not entirely sure what the cause of the issue was, but it seems it was likely something in one of the prior updates that broke it, so luckily, it seems that it took other subsequent updates to the system to unbreak it and get it working again.

[Rokuz]

Hi guys, I also came across similar nonsense on my SteamDeck.
Rebooting didn't help me, but the following worked:
1) Turn on airplane mode;
2) Turn off (not restart) the Steam Deck;
2.1) Clap your hands;
3) Turn on the Steam Deck and turn off airplane mode.

[Retr0Robby]

After having these same issues myself I found a solution.
1) Open file explorer
2) On the left pane under devices click on "rootfs"
3) Click into the folder "etc"
4) Click into the "bluetooth" folder
5) From there we need to open the "main.conf" file and make a change.
6) From here scroll down until you're between lines 114 to 116 and here you will find a setting that says "D-Bus Experimental" and it looks like this.

# Enables D-Bus Experimental interfaces
# possible values: true or false
#Experimental = false

7) Change the experimental line to "true" (leave the quotes out). Save your changes then reboot and you should see that Bluetooth is back.