My journey in testing various Linux distros on my GPD Win Mini, with timestamps.
Q4 2023- After receiving my GPD Win Mini, I updated the BIOS using the GPD EFI Tool here and then removed the 512gb Kioxia Windows NVMe for safekeeping, then added a 1TB Inland 2230 NVMe to install Linux on.
Initial impressions of Nobara Linux were great, and over the course of two months, I found everything worked great on the Gnome version of the distro. Everything on the device worked, though the one tweak I had to make was to rotate the desktop Portrait Left in order for everything to show up properly.
January 10th 2024 - After testing both similar distros of Nobara Linux and Fedora Linux, I went ahead and tried the SteamOS-like Arch-based distro known as ChimeraOS. I was quite surprised that the screen orientation was properly set, Decky Loader works fine and the games run fine!
January 19th 2024 - ChimeraOS is incredibly stable on this device, despite using an older 6.5.6 kernel at the time of this writing.
January 19th 2024 - The next distro I tried was Arch Linux, to see if it worked with my scripts of if it needed any help. I, personally, am not a fan of installing it manually. I usually end up using the “archinstall” script, but it looks here to be failing, so perhaps in February I’ll try installing it again. Back to Chimera for now!
February 16th 2024 - New month, new Arch Linux installer ISO! I went through the archinstall script included with the new ISO and it successfully completed installing Arch on the GPD Win Mini.
February 16th 2024 - Having access to the AUR is kinda nice….gamescope, mullvad-vpn, jotta-cli and a few other things I tend to have up and running on Fedora or Nobara installs. May get my MicroSD card with emulators on it setup to run through EmuDeck- I wonder if the ChimeraOS installer for EmuDeck would work fine here…
February 16th 2024 - Looks like It even docks fine with my 2022-era JSAUX docking station with all ports working, however it doesn’t seem to recognize anything except power from the Steam Deck Dock. Also, apparently on this mostly-bone-stock Arch KDE install, it looks like there’s barely any battery drain in sleep? Sleeping the handheld disconnected from power for 12 hours resulted in only a 1% battery drop which as odd, as S3 deep sleep isn’t enabled in the BIOS. Also it seems Nobara Linux and Arch Linux are stable with 7200Mhz RAM clocks via the BIOS, whereas ChimeraOS was working better at 6400-7000mhz.
April 1st 2024 - Plans in motion to test this as a desktop docked setup with the GPD G1 hub/eGPU soon.