TL;DR: it mostly works out of the box.

After the Blue Yeti microphone last year, now I bought a Jabra Evolve3 65 headset for my coworking space. And, just like with that microphone, I had doubts about whether it would work well on Linux with Pipewire… I’ve been using it for a few days now, I can share a little bit.

The very good news is that it works out-of-the-box with the small USB-C dongle (Jabra Link). The audio output works, the microphone too, and it doesn’t switch to a low-quality profile when recording as it does with every Bluetooth headset I’ve tested. Only high-quality audio. I haven’t tested that over Bluetooth, though, as I’m quite happy with that dongle staying on my USB-C dock anyway.

The “meh” part: for configuration, I initially used the Jabra Plus Android app. Works well too, and adds the headset to my Google Find Hub, which is nice. I also gave jabridge a try: it’s an unofficial tool to control Jabra headsets and dongles on Linux. At the moment, it has a few bugs, but it works well enough for most settings. So, OK, I guess.

There’s one thing I don’t like: the hardware volume control. I use this device to listen to music too, and sometimes I like to set it to a low volume. But on this device, it’s a bit weird: even at 15% the sound is pretty loud (compared to what I have in other headsets), and at 10% it suddenly drops: no sound anymore. It’s not a big issue, but it’s annoying. Thankfully, this is easy to fix in Pipewire by configuring WirePlumber to enable a software volume mixer for that device:

$ cat > ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/60-jabra-softvol.conf <<EOF
monitor.alsa.rules = [
  {
    matches = [
      {
        device.name = "~alsa_card.usb-_Jabra_*"
      }
    ]
    actions = {
      update-props = {
        api.alsa.soft-mixer = true
      }
    }
  }
]
EOF
$ systemctl --user restart wireplumber

And voilà! It works perfectly.

Overall, I really like this headset. It’s lightweight enough to be comfortable, the active noise cancellation is pretty convenient when my office neighbors are talking, and the sound quality is pretty good.

For reference: I’m using Arch Linux (btw), Pipewire 1.6.10, WirePlumber 0.5.18.