what is a good PCIe bluetooth card?

@ariadne Generally, you buy a full Wi-Fi adapter in PCIe, and it will come with bluetooth. The chips are all dual these days. Generally, they are less than $60 us dollars.

As to brand, TP-Link would be fine. however, it depends on the OS you need to use. If its Windows, TP link will be fine.

@ariadne they make those?

@ariadne are we talking full-size PCIe, mini-PCIe, or NGFF?

@gedvondur @ariadne At least for Intel wifi cards, the Bluetooth is USB and not PCIe.

@gedvondur @ariadne Unfortunately, those do not tend to expose Bluetooth over PCI-e: every one of them that I've seen (which is, of course, not every one in existence, but I've specifically looked at maybe a dozen in the past year) comes with a short internal cable to connect to an unused USB header on your motherboard.

@noisytoot @ariadne True, they use the internal header. That's how they all work, as far as I know, there are no pure PCIe Bluetooth cards. The software stacks all treat it as a USB device and it is the dominant way to connect Bluetooth.

I can't see a reason to have a decicated PCIe card for it, its not like Bluetooth is straining USB speeds.

@gedvondur @noisytoot ok what is a good USB bluetooth dongle that works well under a Linux distribution

@ariadne @gedvondur in my experience (which is mostly only using bluetooth audio/A2DP):

• intel wifi/bluetooth cards (at least AX210 and AC8265) work well
• whatever the broadcom USB thing in the ThinkPad X200 is works well (but only bluetooth 2.1+EDR)
• RTL8723CS (in the pinephone) is crap and audio randomly stutters

so I would recommend something intel (unless you care about not loading non-free firmware, in which case I’ve heard CSR8510 is good even though I’ve never used it myself and the aforementioned broadcom thing that I forgot the name of worked without loading any firmware too)

@noisytoot @gedvondur i mean i would prefer libre firmware, but this machine is $8000 worth of UNIX workstation and blobs anyway so...