So, I changed the distro on my desktop from ubuntu -> manjaro

a common setup for me is to watch videos on my laptop, stream the audio to my desktop and play video games while listening to the video audio

This worked mostly fine in ubuntu, when connecting from my laptop I could always get my laptop as an a2dp_sink with:

pacmd set-card-profile bluez... a2dp_sink

but moving over to manjaro caused a whole slew of problems.

Of note is that a lot of these problems were intermittent, when booting from windows or a live ubuntu usb stick things would work a bit better, but after the first reboot they want back to the way they were before.

1. bluetooth card would not work unless rebotting from ubuntu or windows : solution: add btusb to /etc/modules... to load it at boot

2. when connecting to desktop from laptop, bluetoothd would straight up crash : solution: disable bluetooth LE on desktop by adding ControllerMode = bredr to /etc/bluetooth/main.conf.

3. This is incidentally fixed by the previous two, but only the machine doing the connecting can claim a2dp_sink. If I connect from my laptop, my laptop can stream to my desktop. If I connect from my desktop, my desktop can stream to my laptop. Not exactly sure of the fix to this yet.