This is a guide for setting up Pop_OS! 20.04 LTS on the GPD Win 2. The majority of things work out of the box. For the things that don't, I have documented my setup here. Most of this stuff was found by other users, so I'm just collecting all this information in one place with the hope that it'll be helpful for others.
- Wifi
- Bluetooth
- Touch screen
- Volume control buttons
- Screen brightness control buttons
- Go to sleep on lid close
- Joystick mouse control (in mouse mode)
- Joystick as an Xbox controller (in controller mode)
The GPD Win 2 uses an integrated GPU, so download the version of Pop_OS without NVIDIA drivers. I am using 20.04 LTS. Flash the image to a USB drive the same way you would for any other computer.
Turn the device on. When you see the GPD splash screen pop up, hold the Esc and Delete keys together to get into the BIOS. From here, you should see a pretty standard BIOS menu. You can select a device to boot into (such as your Pop_OS flash drive).
When booting into the flash drive, the screen will be rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise. This is normal and we will fix it later.
When the live boot Pop_OS screen pops up, press the Enter key to boot into the flash drive. The device should boot onto the Pop_OS desktop. Once the desktop appears, the touch screen should now work, and can be used to navigate the setup menus.
The "Install Pop_OS" setup window should pop up automatically. This window will be cut off with the default rotated orientation, so you'll probably need to "press and drag" the window around using the touch screen. Install Pop_OS however you normally would (setting up partitions, etc...).
Once finished, reboot the device and it should boot into your new Pop_OS installation.
Probably the first thing you want to do. Click the top right menu, click "Settings", go down to "Displays", change "Orientation" to "Portrait Left". Confirm settings.
Note: this fixes rotation for your logged in user, but not the login screen or boot sequence. To fix the login screen rotation, make the above change, then run the following (source):
sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm3/.config/monitors.xml
Some things might not work until you install updates. Once this is done, reboot and everything in the above list should be working. This will probably take a while.
sudo apt get update
sudo apt get upgrade
Disabling "Screen Keyboard" in the Accessibility settings is not enough to get rid of the on-screen keyboard. You'll also need this extension installed and enabled to remove the on-screen keyboard in Gnome (source): https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3222/block-caribou-36/
For whatever reason, the native Linux binary for visualboyadvance sometimes does not detect joysticks. This is an issue with the emulator itself, not with the GPD Win's built-in controller. The controller should work fine with other emulators.
You can either use the Windows binary in Wine or use a joystick->keyboard mapping program. If I find a not-stupid solution, I'll update this point.
Update: Just use mGBA.