Librem13v3 Recap

Why did I get it?

So in late(-ish) 2018 my laptop broke (quite spectacularly so, I might tell that story another time). Since I needed a computer for both university as well as at the time the majority of my freetime activities, I needed a replacement. I had a decent number of laptops lying around unused, but all of them were broken in some way or another, so simply not suited long term. I needed to get a new device.

At the time I was still under the impression that I needed a somewhat powerful CPU, so when searching for possible replacements I only considered new and modern devices.

A non-consumer grade laptop manufactured by one of the usual suspects would have been a pretty safe bet, but I felt adventurous. I was impressed by Purisms plans and efforts to counteract the intels management engine on their processors. At the time they were actually the only company that sold laptops featureing modern CPUs with disabled ME that were remotely reasonably priced.

The other feature Purism commonly uses to advertise their laptops are the hardware kill switches for wireless comunications as well as the camera and microphone. Those were not something I personally cared about, but I thought they were nice to have.

The other thing that interested me about their laptops was that they used CoreBoot. I have always been pretty annoyed by the various proprietary BIOS and UEFI systems manufacturers are insulting their otherwise decent devices with, so this was really appealing.

Since I like my laptops small and portable, I ordered the model with the 13-inch screen.

There were a few other Linux focused laptop manufacturers that I was interested in as well, but at the time none of those sold laptops with German keyboards and I am not friends with american keyboards.

The first one

I was pretty excited when the first one arrived. Based on the quality of the packaging, Purism were obviously trying to make an impression. The package and presentation looked pretty nice and professional overall.

So I got the device out of the box, played around with the pre-installed OS for a few minutes and then swapped in the drive from my previous laptop. The software side worked perfectly, which is what you would expect from a laptop designed to run Linux.

The first problem I noticed was the case. Purism uses cases for their laptops by a generic manufacturer. That makes sense, because manufacturing a laptop case requires a lot of special and expensive tooling and is generally not trivial. Many brands, even well known ones, sell laptops in that exact same case, just with different innards. The problem: The case is cheap as hell.

Right out of the box the lid when closed did not fit the underpart. When closed it was off-set by about two millimeters to the left and there was a noticeable gap near the hinge that did not look like it should be there. I easiely fixed the screen off-set when I had the device open, but that really should not have been necessary. The gap was not fixable.

Staying in theme, re-attaching the bottom cover was pain incarnate. It required some convincing and bending until it decided to sit where it should.

From what I can tell, Purisms configuration of that specific case prevented it from being assembled correctly. I can accept a lot, but at least the case should fit together well. This is a complaint I have with a lot of modern laptops. The average case quality decreased massively over the last decade, likely linked to the move from plastic to aluminium as main material.

I used that device for a few months, during which the second big issue became apparent: The one I was sent was faulty. When I watched a video or did anything else that taxed both graphics and CPU, the screen would freeze, slowly fade to grey with a light ring appearing around the edges. Since I could still ssh into the OS and since external monitors were not affected, it was definitely a hardware issue. It would go away when powercycling the device, sometimes even when turning the screen off and on again.

I got in touch with customer support (they were pretty nice and helpful) and RMA'd the device. Purism used a service partner in Germany, so I got a new device within a week.

The second one

One faulty device is not that big of a deal. Especially with smaller companies there can easiely be problems and I was (and still am) perfectly willing to accept that.

The second one I got had the exact same case-related issues as the first one. Even worse: The people servicing the device (they swapped the drive from the first one into the second one) completely mangled the screws. The screws were made of an indredibly soft material, so I don't actually fault them. Still it took me nearly an hour to get all the screws out so I could swap the drive. I replaced the screws with better ones I got from a few broken donor laptops.

The screen troubles were gone, but I soon noticed another issue: The fan miracously never turned on, not even under heavy load. So I opened the device again, probed around for a few minutes and then noticed that the fan controller chip was not correctly soldered on, one of its surface-mount legs did not make contact with the pad on the PCB. Not wanting to go through the RMA process again, I fixed this myself.

The next problem were the kill switches, which were placed on the left side of the laptop, facing outwards next to the IO ports. If you ever carried a laptop in a backpack, you know that nothing should ever stick out of the sides of a laptop if you want it to survive. Unsurprisingly, the switches broke. Since they are on a daughter board, I could have easiely replaced them. But I decided against it, since the replacements would no doubt break again and since I never actually used them. Instead I just hardwired the wireless switch to the on position and the camera and microphone switch to the off position.

The laptop had no further issues for about two years(-ish).

Then the hinge problems began. First the screen began to wobble. A few weeks later the plastic cover that hid the cables between the hinges broke. And finally, the left hinge ripped out of the screen. Turns out the entire hinge assembly is incredibly flimsy. The manufacturer of the case is to blame for this, but Purism really should have chosen a different one.

Since my laptop was out of warranty, a new screen would have cost $60. I decided that was not worth it and instead baught a used Thinkpad X200 with libreboot to serve my computing needs on the go.

The Librem continued to function as my workstation for another one and a half years. It lived permanently on my desk, connected to external peripherals. It did the job fine, until about four weeks ago.

Suddenly, while I was in the middle of editing some pictures I took the night before, the laptop powered down. It was a proper shutdown, so I initially thought it was a software issue. I tried turning the device on a few times more and it always powered down again. Then it suddenly decided it would not get past the LUKS passkey prompt and finally it would not even turn on at all.

Apparently it died for good.

What went wrong?

The obvious choice for the primary bad design decission is the case. A small company like Purism obviously can not manufacture their own cases, but when chosing a case kit by an outside manufacturer, they should have chosen a bit more carefully.

Or instead, maybe they should have just sold their motherboards as replacements for existing laptops. The X200 I mentioned earlier has what I consider to be a near perfect case. It is very robust, very accessible, has a pretty good keyboard and these days can be acquired for very little. Sticking a modern computer (and screen) into the X200 case sounds pretty good. Maybe I just do not know enough about designing computers, but I am a bit surprised no one has done that yet.

The other issues can probably be explained by inexperience and manufacturing tolerances.

Overall I do not think this is completely unsalvageable. A better case, better quality assurance, a bit more thought put into the placement of components and I think a future version of that laptop might turn out to be decent.

Purisms contributions to different components of the Linux desktop, their work of counteracting the IME and the fact that they designed a motherboard from scratch in the first place, which is not simple, show that they are serious about it. Hopefully that eventually leads to products I would consider using.

The Thinkpad

Since I already mentioned it twice, let's talk about the X200. It has been my primary laptop for over a year and since a few months ago also my primary workstation.

True, the hardware is a bit outdated. But for my use cases it mostly works fine. Turns out the processor is still perfectly adequate for text-editing, compiling, listening to music, watching the odd video and browsing the web (with an ad blocker the web is considerably less resource hungry). The major pain point is the screen, but I did the typical screen mod and installed a panel from an X200s. Of course you won't be watching 4k video on it, but that is overrated anyway.

For some tasks, like editing pictures, I need a better processor of course. For that purpose I bought a used office PC for about 50€ which has a decent(-ish) processor. I actually got it before the Librem died, since I planned to retire it anyway but got a bit lazy after my recent move. It does its job fine, but I rarely ever need it, so it is only powered on for a few hours every other week on average.