Bug 1044642

OK, new status: applet shows up in GNOME after connecting to a device manually (this is obviously not desirable, as you cannot initiate a connection without calling bluetoothctl from CLI.
It still doesn't show up in Cinnamon. Furthermore, one needs the GNOME libraries in order to have the bluetooth menu (no such setting in cinnamons control center)

As a workaround, I wrote a little script and a udev rule, to automatically bring up the bluetooth device on startup, and connect to my devices upon desktop login.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8043347

Still, this is not more than a workaround, imho.

I wonder if there is any activity on bluetooth integration in cinnamon.  When cinnamon first appeared in fedora, bluetooth was working perfectly out of the box, with each update it seems to be bitrotting away.  The missing applet is just one thing, the list of steps I have to go through just to listen to music on a bluetooth headset is getting longer and longer.  This is what I currently have to do (current F21 as of today):

1. Open KDE system settings (no idea why there is no bluetooth in cinnamon system settings, but the KDE one is the only one I found which is working).

2. Goto bluetooth, open the "Adapters" tab.  Tick "Powered" (until about two weeks ago, this step was not necessary, it likely appeared with some update).

3. Go to devices tab, select headset, "Connect" (until the upgrade to F21, the settings would be remembered, but not it's forgotten each time I close the lid of the laptop)

4. Click on Sound applet (or go to cinnamon system settings), select "Sound Settings", select the headset as output device (until I think the upgrade to F21, the headset would be selected automatically as soon as it was connected)

5. Select A2DP profile to get decent sound.

Now the whole circus starts anew as soon as I need to suspend the laptop.  Way in the past, everything worked automatically as soon as the devices were configured once, with a bluetooth icon in the cinnamon taskbar.  Am I missing some package?  (I don't think I reinstalled Fedora ever since I got the machine, but went through many yum and fedup updates.)

Oops, I came to this bug searching for "cinnamon" and "bluetooth" on Google, did not realize it was filed against Gnome.

So, for the record, I logged in as "Gnome" instead.  There the applet is actually there, despite the bug report.

But the result is not much better: Connecting works out of the box, so steps 1-3 above are not required on Gnome.  However, sound does not switch over to the headset once connected, so step 4 is still required (it used to work automatically with Gnome 2 in the good old days...).  For step 5: It offers me to select the A2DP profile, but does not switch over when selected.  Something seems seriously buggy here.

So using Gnome, I cannot even listen to Music in reasonable quality at all...

(In reply to loomsen from comment #1)
> OK, new status: applet shows up in GNOME after connecting to a device
> manually (this is obviously not desirable, as you cannot initiate a
> connection without calling bluetoothctl from CLI.

I'll close this bug then. If you have particular ideas on how it should behave, please file a bug against gnome-shell in the upstream bugzilla.gnome.org bug tracker.