For context, LDAC is one of the few wireless audio codecs stamped Hi-Res by the Japan Audio Society and its encoder is open source since Android 8, so you can see just how long Windows is sleeping on this. I’m excited about the incoming next gen called LC3plus, my next pair is definitely gonna have that.
Bluetooth drivers and the firmware on devices suck. Modern Windows with Intel Bluetooth seems to work as long as your devices don’t do weird shit. Broadcom chips are often problematic as hell, sometimes requiring a reboot to work after disconnecting a device.
Linux Bluetooth audio was a struggle for years. Pipewire made it Just Work for me. It’s still relatively new, but I don’t have any complaints, unlike in the Pulse+BlueZ days.
What about wireless headphones that don’t use bluetooth? I think I had some Logitech ones that did not use bluetooth. Are those a viable alternative to bluetooth on linux?
They appear on the Linux side as USB audio devices. They work as well as they do on Linux (or Mac, or Android, or any other OS) because they don’t rely on the OS to deal with the wireless part. If they work, they work, but if they don’t, you’re usually out of luck. No settings to tweak, no channels to pick!
The Logitech protocol is more reliable than most normal Bluetooth headphones in my experience, but they also send quite a lot of data over the 2.4Ghz spectrum. That may interfere with other Bluetooth devices (though Logitech did try to prevent that) or old WiFi networks still in 2.4GHz.