On a fresh-new CentOS 8 desktop, it is not trivial to get a Bluetooth headset connected for the first time.

Symptoms

When trying to connect to a paired headset in Bluetooth settings, it keeps failing but not error log can be seen. The logs can be retrieved by running command journalctl -xe and scroll up to find the read lines similar to a2dp-sink profile connect failed for 5C:C6:E9:B9:9D:DE: Protocol not available.

This error message tells that the bluetooth service successfully identifies the headset, but having trouble to hand over the connection to the audio service.

Fix

The most common audio service shipped with CentOS is pulseaudio. The quick fix is to restart the pulseaudio service.

pulseaudio -k
pulseaudio --start

Note that both commands are meant to be run as non-root user.

Note

If using Firefox, make sure to upgrade to ver. 71+ as older versions were not shipped with built-in mp3 codec.

Credits

Thanks to this question