Bluetooth 6.2 – more responsive, improves security, USB comms, and testing

I haven't tried a bluetooth device in years, is pairing still godawful? I wish they would give you the option to pair through USB. Just plug in the host and peripheral and press the pair button, and it should automatically negotiate pairing. I don't care if it requires the hassle of occasionally having to plug something in to pair the two devices as long as it works 100% reliably.

It's not that bad really, I haven't had a bad Bluetooth Pairing experience in years now, and I keep switching some devices ALOT (phones, headphones, keyboards, mice)

> I wish they would give you the option to pair through USB. Just plug in the host and peripheral and press the pair button, and it should automatically negotiate pairing.

This is called "Out of band" (OOB) pairing and supported since Bluetooth 4 iirc, it's a method which allows key exchange using a different bearer than Bluetooth.

It's implemented quite famously on the Sony Playstation 3 and 4, where BT-pairing is done by connecting via USB and pressing the "Playstation" button.

On other Bluetooth-devices it's mostly not implemented because apart from the limited support for OOB pairing over USB on the host-device, it would require the peripherial device to also have a USB data-interface in control of the Bluetooth chipset.

So more complexity and cost, to solve a problem which barely exists anymore.

I really want BT pairing over NFC , which my Lenovo ThinkPad II keyboard supports. On Linux. I believe a bunch of my headsets may support this too?

I think maybe there's like on one or two people who have gotten neard daemon doing Bluetooth OOB with Bluez, but it's very obscured in results or their reports have bit rotted off the net.