I am surprised to not having found a suggestion for this already, but on Windows you now get notified when a BT peripheral in pairing mode (a mouse, keyboard, etc…) is in a certain proximity of the host and you get the option to pair.
This works via BLE advertisements, a feature that bluez already seems to support - albeit it is experimental.
I wonder if there’s a reason why this isn’t a thing in Gnome. I’d volunteer to take up some work on that, but I would like to get a feeling for whether anybody else thinks this might actually improve UX and/or this is already on somebody’s roadmap.
I don’t think people are against adding support for this (of course assuming that these advertisements are somewhat standardized and not vendor defined), it most likely simply wasn’t on anyone’s radar yet.
If you’d like to look into implementing that, a first step would be to discuss with designers how the feature should be exposed in UI (we could send a notification for that, or possibly something less obtrusive would be wanted).
Also a place to implement the feature would have to be found. It’d likely need a daemon that handles the incoming advertisements and sends notifications if there’s a potentially interesting one.
