I could not get it to connect until I issued this command

echo 1 > /sys/module/bluetooth/parameters/disable_ertm

It worked fine before what is ertm ? (Enhanced Re-Transmission Mode) Well whatever that is. It apparently causes problems for the Xbox One controllers so it needs to be disabled.

How do I set this on boot?

It took two days to figure this out, what a pain.

Any ideas?

If you are using Retropie here's the fix:

https://techwiztime.com/guide/retrop...ne-controller/

Maybe write a script or create a configuration file to disable the module that is responsible for running ERTM.
I'm not a developer so I can't tell you what the strings in the script should be, sorry.

FWIW I had to consistently run a command on my laptop in order to get the keyboard to light up running Mint.
If I didn't run that command as root the keyboard wouldn't work. I creating a file with strings to make it run at boot time but couldn't find enough information to make it run.

Maybe there is a way to blacklist it? <guessing>
https://padovan.org/blog/tag/enhance...smission-mode/

In /etc/modprobe.d/xbox-one-s.conf

Can the modprobe.d.conf be used in most cases to disable a lot of things?

Thanks dugan that did the trick. I had just put the

echo 1 > /sys/module/bluetooth/parameters/disable_ertm

at the end of rc.bluetooth but that seemed more of a kludge that a fix.