Remove Bluetooth tether connections from Gnome
I was experimenting with using Google Smart Lock when paired to my notebooks bluetooth.
On Fedora 34 with Gnome 40 this is a painless process where you pair, verify the pin and connect. As you would expect.
Gnome is smart and detects this is a phone and displays in the panel menu the phones network strength and a button to enable bluetooth tethering. This is great!
The problem arises when you decide to disconnect your phone and find the menu option will not disappear. Even unpairing your phone from the bluetooth menu will not remove the now useless menu option. Which really irked my OCD.
This is because NetworkManager creates and manages a new 'network interface' that is created at the time of bluetooth pairing.
After some digging I found that when you unpair the phone from your computer the bluetooth connection is still saved on the machine. We can see this with
$ bluetoothctl paired-devices
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Wireless Controller
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx OontZ Angle
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Michael's Pixel
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Dell WM615 Mouse
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Satechi M1 Mouse
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Trekz Air by AfterShokz
Device xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Polar H10 75B2F626
As you can see above, the commend gave us a list of bluetooth connections sorted by type. The 2nd column shows the devices Bluetooth UUID and the 3rd column the devices name. Once you identify the UUID that corresponds to the device that is stuck in the panel menu you can remove it with. bluetoothctl remove [UUID]
Despite this small flaw, I still find Gnome to be the most intuitive Linux desktop and am sure this will be worked out as NetworkManager
makes further progress.
In the meantime, if small things like this annoys you, and you find yourself pairing your mobile phone to your Gnome desktop these two quick commands should remove it for you.