All, I recently acquired Nothing Ear.

They work great with my Nothing Phone (1):

  • seamless bluetooth connection (even a popup if bluetooth is not active on phone)
  • great phone app to customize ear behaviors
  • impressive sound

But when I connect to my Linux desktop (Ubuntu 23.04, kernel 6.2), the experience is bad:

  • 2 “Nothring Ear” appear on the bluetooth setting page
  • most of the times, I can “connect” when clicking on 1 of the lines, but then the Ear (1) don’t appear as audio options, in or out, they are just connected devices that I cannot use

Any guidance?

Related discussions

So, I have a few potential solutions and this might be distro dependent.

Firstly, when pairing, make sure both earbuds are in the case, and the case is in pairing mode.

If that doesn’t work in terminal, run ‘sudo systemctl restart bluetooth’ this should lead to one of the two Nothing Ear symbols having the Headset symbol.

Finally, installing (at your own risk) either $ sudo apt-get install pavucontrol or, the package; pulseaudio-modules-bt from github (EHfive’s fork of pulseaudio bluetooth modules). leads to the Ear’s being recognised

9 days later

I’m experiencing the same issue with Nothing Ear (2) and Ubuntu. However, my wife’s J8L works fine with the same setup and switches correctly between my phone and laptop. After hrry’s suggestion, I installed Pavucontrol, but it didn’t resolve the issue – the earbuds only connect if I disable and remove them from my phone (which defeats the main purpose of buying the Nothing Ear (2) – the dual connection feature). Even then, it doesn’t always work; sometimes it just freezes, and the only solution is to full reset and set them up again.

15 days later

Thanks @hrry and @AlexBervr (sorry, I was out of town recently).
I eventually installed fresh Ubuntu 24.04.1 (just keeping /home), and things work like a charm, after pairing them initially as expected (in case, pairing mode). Now I can easily swith the Ear (1) from Nothing phone (1) to laptop (a framework).

The only thing I miss on Ubuntu? the Ear sound control panel that I enjoy on Nothing phone (1)

  • hrry replied to this.
    a month later

    On debian 12 Bookworm with Gnome, you can upgrade pipewire (pulseaudio audio server replacement) to the backported version with sudo apt install -t bookworm-backports pipewire pipewire-audioand it should work .

    It worked for me