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PayPalIn the continuing saga of GPD versus Bazzite Linux, the GPD team have now posted their own statement on what happened.
Who? GPD are a Chinese hardware vendor that makes various somewhat popular handheld PCs like the GPD WIN, GPD Pocket and so on. They've been regularly covered by big YouTubers and other news sites. Bazzite is a popular version of Linux based on Fedora for PC handhelds and more.
To set the scene a little, here's a refresher — Back in September 2025 GPD highlighted Bazzite support on their main page for the GPD WIN 5, making it all look quite official. Earlier in January 2026 GPD went on to claim that an official adaptation of the GPD WIN 5 with Bazzite was coming and that hardware had been sent to which the Bazzite founder said otherwise. The situation got messier when the Bazzite founder again said it wasn't true and asked GPD to stop using their name.
Now in a Reddit post from GPD they explained:
First of all, we’re just a hardware manufacturer focused on the niche market. We have no interest in getting involved in any political disputes. All we just want is to build good devices so more users can enjoy using them — whether they’re Windows users or Linux users. That’s always been our goal.
Starting with the Win 4, we began working with Bazzite. Back then, Antheas was the one who reached out to GPD, and that collaboration continued with the WIN Max 2 as well. So when it came to the Win 5, following our usual practice, we planned to send a device to Bazzite for system adaptation and optimization.
At that point, Antheas mentioned to me that Bazzite was having some internal management issues. I didn’t think much of it — management problems don’t really affect system adaptation work — so we decided to continue the cooperation as usual. I also casually posted about the collaboration with Bazzite on X.
And then, just three days later, the Bazzite announcement you saw came out.
From day one, all of GPD’s collaborations with partners have been entirely voluntary and unpaid, including reviews as well as software and operating system development, so I don’t know whether there are any commercial disputes involved or something else going on behind the scenes, but GPD is completely innocent in this matter
YYang
The "internal management issues" noted are to do with Antheas (Antheas Kapenekakis), who was previously part of the Bazzite team and creator of the Handheld Daemon project, but ended up being kicked out due to "repeated violations of our Code of Conduct". Antheas has since written up their own version of events that lead to them being removed, which is a little on the spicy side.
Open source and drama - what a combination huh? Always a shame to see things like this, as it's often not truly clear to us outsiders who is in the right. But this is part of what comes with open source development, with a lot of it completely out in the open and when nerds of differing opinions collide it can end badly.
So overall in this case, it seems GPD have simply been caught in the cross-fire of Bazzite team issues.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I wish I could pick a side, but I don't really understand what it entails. Seems to be about input being managed from the kernel or the userspace or something like that.
Thanks for the coverage.
I'm out. I prefer utopian SciFi
Guess that the lesson to be learned is that one shouldn't be too quick to jump on a new distro's bandwagon.
On a completely unrelated sidenote, I am hearing good things about opensuse tumbleweed on gpdwin devices.
Last edited by emphy on 30 Jan 2026 at 1:43 pm UTC
I made the effort to all read that and regret it as a giant waste of time. Every organization has disagreements and conflicts, but this comes across as petty and unprofessional, full of unverifiable anecdotes and irrelevant gossip. Bazzite is smart to remove people like this as they become giant resource drains in the end.
Bazzite is smart to remove people like this as they become giant resource drains in the end.I disagree. It was well written and had examples of where friction was causing issues. But as Liam notes, looking from the outside in, it's impossible to say who's in the right. Just unfortunate drama.
Interesting not at the end where Antheas claims that Bazzite can now never be attached to hardware officially. Not sure I understood the why of that.
Quoting: scaineInteresting not at the end where Antheas claims that Bazzite can now never be attached to hardware officially. Not sure I understood the why of that.From what I understood, Antheas claims part ownership of the brand and will block attempts to change the trademark rule to allow its use by hardware vendor. But I'm unsure about this.
Credential abuse/mishandling does not legally give Kyle the ability to trademark Bazzite or take this kind of decision. In fact, it would be hard trademark Bazzite now, as it is contaminated through my involvement, a lot of which is public and unretractable, and poor handling thereafter. This legal murkiness (pre-existing to an extent) is part of the reason I will be focusing my efforts elsewhere. The Bazzite mark can only be used non-commercially from now on and not e.g. sold moving forward otherwise we will need to have a follow-up discussion.Last edited by amatai on 30 Jan 2026 at 2:15 pm UTC
Antheas (Antheas Kapenekakis), who was previously part of the Bazzite team and creator of the Handheld Daemon project, but ended up being kicked out due to "repeated violations of our Code of Conduct".Maybe I'm going to regret asking but what did that guy do?
Last edited by Stella on 30 Jan 2026 at 2:34 pm UTC
Quoting: SakuretsuMaking software and hardware working together, which is actually quite hard, very technical and a bit boring.Antheas (Antheas Kapenekakis), who was previously part of the Bazzite team and creator of the Handheld Daemon project, but ended up being kicked out due to "repeated violations of our Code of Conduct".Maybe I'm going to regret asking but what did that guy do?
For example, it makes so that Linux can connect to the internet on an handeld with some wifi modem and antenna but unusual linking or that the software you use can access the position of the analogues sticks.
Quoting: amataiMy guess is that the question was about the claimed "repeated violations of our Code of Conduct".Quoting: SakuretsuMaking software and hardware working together, which is actually quite hard, very technical and a bit boring.Antheas (Antheas Kapenekakis), who was previously part of the Bazzite team and creator of the Handheld Daemon project, but ended up being kicked out due to "repeated violations of our Code of Conduct".Maybe I'm going to regret asking but what did that guy do?
For example, it makes so that Linux can connect to the internet on an handeld with some wifi modem and antenna but unusual linking or that the software you use can access the position of the analogues sticks.
Last edited by Eike on 30 Jan 2026 at 3:06 pm UTC
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