I am one of those poor bastards that had a hell of a time getting my Airpods working with Linux. Searches led me to going to /etc/bluetooth/main.conf and changing ControllerMode to “bredr”. This got the AirPods working, but then my bt keyboard and mouse wouldn’t connect.
What I wound up doing was switching ControllerMode to bredr, connecting the airpods, then switching ControllerMode back to “dual”. That kept them connected and allowed other devices to also connect.
So, now I’m sharing this for other poor bastards like me who could t get them to work with the steps that are out there.
This worked in Fedora 38 and will be testing with Ubuntu 23.04 and maybe arch today.
I use AirPods Pro with NixOS without much trouble, though I use the mic on my webcam rather than the AirPods to avoid switching between headset/headphone modes and the audio quality changes that brings. I do sometimes have connection oddities where audio will break up after a couple minutes, but that’s always fixed by a two-click disconnect/connect cycle, so I started doing that preemptively and haven’t had those connection problems since.