I’m on Bazzite Linux 42 and was having some trouble with my 2.4GHz wireless keyboard disconnecting, so I decided to replace it. The new one is having similar issues despite being a different brand (new: XVX, old: Royal Kludge), so I suspect the culprit may actually have been software all along. I have a 2.4GHz wireless mouse connected to the same system that is generally reliable, so I don’t believe it’s an issue of 2.4GHz interference. The keyboards work well when connected to my Mac, so I don’t believe it’s faulty hardware.
This keyboard has one feature that may be helpful in troubleshooting: it flashes an LED when it’s trying to reconnect. (The previous one had no indicator.) I can clearly see that, after the keyboard has been idle for a bit, it starts trying to reconnect again. I suspected a power management issue, but I believe I’ve disabled that. I started with a rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/:
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="1038", ATTR{idProduct}=="1830", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="on"
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0c45", ATTR{idProduct}=="fefe", TEST=="power/control", ATTR{power/control}="on"
(These rules disable power management for both keyboard and mouse, just in case.) I got the IDs with lsusb. I’m assuming the part of the ID before the colon is the vendor ID and the part after is the product ID.
That didn’t seem to help at all, so I tried disabling USB power management with rpm-ostree kargs --append-if-missing="usbcore.autosuspend=-1". That made the problem better, but now it just seems to take longer (a couple of minutes) for the keyboard to lose connectivity. Also, now when it loses connectivity, it seems even disconnecting and reconnecting the dongle doesn’t always fix it.
Anyone have ideas what I might try from here?
To clarify, you have a dongle paired with this keyboard permanently attached to the machine?
These are the dongles that came with the keyboards, so they’re paired out-of-the-box (although I have also used the process for re-pairing them). They are just connected to a USB port on the computer, so not really permanent, but I do leave them connected. Not both at the same time, but each in turn. Hope that answers your question, but I’m not 100% sure I understood it.
That answers my question. If the USB dongle never disconnects from the machine, then I wouldn’t expect anything to show in dmesg, as the ‘sleep mode’ is likely occurring downstream of the USB dongle.
Are there any config utilities that came with it? Failing that, maybe wireshark the dongle and see if there is any sort of sleep/wake signal being passed back through to the host machine?