I am posting this message on December 5, also known as Sinterklaas day. In The Netherlands, this is when kids get their gifts. Heiligabend (Dec.24) or Boxing day, don't mean anything over here in the Low Lands. So, what I am writing about was probably too late for the Dutch market.
Anyway, the Raspberry Pi Foundation published a new version of Raspberry Pi OS, in which they replaced ALSA with PulseAudio. PulseAudio works directly with Bluetooth, solving all the problems I complained about before.
On part, the complaining might have been on my own laziness too. I wrote about installing PulseAudio and that it would be working so so. In particular volume control from the desktop would not work. More on that later.
So, I did the typical apt update and apt full-upgrade. Indeed, now PulseAudio is running.
Without further thinking, I tried to use, just as a newby, the speaker icon in the panel to control the audio volume, without any luck. However, this is me, using a customize panel, so everything is locked in place from the previous of the OS. At closer inspection, the panel item I was using was still ALSA.
After removing the "Volume Control (ALSA/BT)" panel item and adding the "Volume Control (PulseAudio)" item, the problem was finally solved.
With the audio problem solved, I can highly recommend the Raspberry Pi 400 as a desktop PC replacement for non-gaming use.
By now, not only have a written some texts and programs on the RPi400, I also designed (CAD) a few parts and prepared (slize) those for 3D-printing, all with just the RPi400.
Not having used the GPIO yet, I can report the Arduino working perfectly with a RPi400. More on this in posts to come.
