Trying to make my bluetooth card work on Linux
Hello everyone, recently I installed Linux (Fedora KDE, then moved to Zorin) on my laptop (acer aspire e5-573), and ever since the built-in bluetooth card (Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter) stopped working, but only the bluetooth, the wifi still works fine. This is a completely new SSD, so I assume it can't be due to Windows Fast Boot, I even had it disabled.
I did some research and still haven't managed to find a solution, tried some of the solutions like resetting the BIOS to default, power cycling by removing the CMOS battery and holding power for a minute, and found posts where people had the same issue as me, which gave me those results:
sudo rfkill list all
0: acer-wireless: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
1: phy0: Wireless LAN
Soft blocked: no
Hard blocked: no
lsmod | grep btusb
btusb 73728 0
btrtl 32768 1 btusb
btintel 69632 1 btusb
btbcm 24576 1 btusb
btmtk 36864 1 btusb
bluetooth 1011712 15 btrtl,btmtk,btintel,btbcm,bnep,ath3k,btusb
sudo ls /lib/firmware/ath3k/
ls: cannot access file: No such file or directory
Some posts said to sudo apt install --reinstall linux-firmware, but people in the comments said this would also download a bunch of unnecessary drivers, so I didn't before asking
Then I got curious and checked the /lib/firmware/ directory, and while there's no /ath3k/ folder, I found a file named ath3k-1.fw.zst in the /firmware/ directory, and it got me wondering, if I decompress this zst file, will the card work, or will I mess up my system
If anyone knows what I should do from here, any help would be appreciated!
Posted Dec 7, 2025, 4:58 AM UTC