Bluetooth audio doesn't work out of the box with pulseaudio (it does with pipewire)

Description:

I have Manjaro with KDE, which I inistially installed as version 24.something around January 2024 and kept up to date with system updates through Pamac.

I repeatedly tried to connect a pair of bluetooth earbuds and was never able to hear the audio output come from them. The earbuds would connect succesfully via bluetooth and show up as paired and trusted, but they were never visible anywhere as audio output devices.

All the details in this forum thread: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/bluetooth-earphones-connected-but-sound-doesnt-go-through-them/170713

It turned out that I had both pulseaudio and pipewire installed, and I was told that was normal (initially someone said that that was an issue but someone else said that was BS), that that is Manjaro+KDE's default configuration, where Pulseaudio works as the sound server, while Pipewire is used as a video server or something, and there should be no conflict.

The abovementioned thread contains all the things I tried and didn't work to get the earbuds to work.

In the end I solved it as everybody else did having similar issues in the dozens of threads that can be found both on the Manjaro forum and on Reddit: by installing manjaro-pipewire, which as far as I understand, removes pulseauidio and has Pipewire work as the soundserver, basically replacing pulseaudio.

If that is required, that is, if pulseaudio doesn't work with bluetooth (either because it's not designed to or because it's broken), then manjaro-pipewire should be the default. If that's not the case, then something is deeply broken in the pulseaudio installation.

Either way, bluetooth earbuds, headphones, headsets and speakers should work seamlessly out of the box, as they do in every other OS, with zero tinkering and zero configuration, but instead they don't.

Additional info:

Steps to reproduce:

  1. On an out-of-the-box installation of Manjaro with KDE, connect some bluetooth earbuds