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’ve read this can depend a lot on the bluetooth card. Personally after replacing my cheapo dongle from like 2012 that probably just didn’t do a recent enough BT version I didn’t have any issues connecting to them.
What card do you have? Might be useful for anyone else who has the same issue.