You would want to leave most GPS devices set for true north. When you look at the map on a GPS device, the top or up is true north, so most of the time you’ll want your direction on the compass to align precisely with the directions you see on the map.
The main reason you’d want to set your device to magnetic north is so you can use the compass reading from the GPS to navigate with using a magnetic compass without calculating declination.
For example, if I’m out on Lake Superior and I want to head for the south tip of Isle Royale, which is currently over the horizon and not visible to me, my GPS and mapping software, set to true north, may tell me to take a heading of 080.
By using the “magnetic north” setting, I would get a heading that I can use directly on the marine compass (which of course gives only matnetic headings) on my boat’s dash to steer exactly that heading I need to go which might be something like 082.
If I had the GPS device set to “true north”, I would have to do the old-fashioned declination calculation to “translate” between the true north of the map/GPS and the magnetic north of the compass on my dash so that I knew what magnetic compass heading to steer.
So the setting helps eliminate the need to covert true north readings to magnetic north readings that are usable with a conventional magnetic compass. This can sometimes be a significant difference, I have seen aviation charts where a correction of more than 10 degrees is sometimes required.
Grouse