People always say to avoid gaming headphones, but gaming headphones are often the only ones made with built-in external mics. If I’m gaming, I need at least a decent mic. Internal headphone mics aint going to cut it, they are omnidirectional and have terrible quality.

Sure you can get the perfect set up with some high quality headphones and a separate recording setup but there are issues with this. Boom mics are the highest quality of course but they take up a ton of space and are unsightly. You need to get the perfect length of boom and hold it close to your face at all times… it’s necessary for content creation but not practical for everyday playing. There are “mod mics” you can attach to the side of your headphones, but there is only one company that makes them (Antlion) and both of their products in this line are terrible. I’ve had nothing but issues and they are not cheap.

So in the end I settled for the Sony Inzone headphones and they are fine. They are ugly as sin and the sound quality is obviously lacking, but it’s way better than most in the category. You can connect via Bluetooth but the dongle works OOTB on Linux. The headphones are poor without a firmware update, and that needs a Windows VM and it’s a bit tricky. The update will disable the USB device at points, so you will need to re-enable the USB passthrough when this happens. Pretty easy to do with GNOME-Boxes.