GPD release their own statement on the confusion with Bazzite Linux support

Update 30/01/26 16:52 UTC - The Bazzite team have now put up their own final update on the situation on the official Bazzite forum. The post from Noel Miller notes that GPD were not at fault, and reiterates that the former team member mentioned below (Antheas) was removed for "several Code of Conduct violations over the last few years" that was done by "an overwhelming majority vote by the Universal Blue members". And additionally, notes that any hardware vendors should contact their team not members directly.

They're hoping to turn it into a positive outcome now the situation is clear by helping GPD expand their support.

Original article below:

In 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.