Paprefs and bluetooth not working

I'm having the same problem with Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 on my Dell M6500. Bluetooth stays ON for about a couple of seconds and immediately disconnects. I don't understand if this an issue related to pulseaudio or something else, so I opened paprefs to see if that will allow me to play with some settings but I cannot make any entry, everything is grayed out. Obviously this is a problem by itself that I need to fix, but I don't know if that will fix the bluetooth issue. I checked on another machine with 20.04, bluetooth works but paprefs also refuses to accept entries.

thanks.