Broken screen hinge on Purism Librem 13v3

I've been using my Purism Librem 13v3 laptop daily for 8 nearly years, and now the left screen hinge mounts broke on the screen side.

I noticed it when closing the lid gave away cracking sounds. The closed screen is not aligned with the bottom case anymore; I can see a bit of the body.

Other people had the same problem with what Purism once advertised as super sturdy hinge:

Designed to last, reinforced metal, mounted directly to the case and screen

We get excited about hinges. Often overlooked by inadequate laptop makers, our hinge is built to be sturdy for life, staying shut when shut, and staying put in any of the 130° of screen angle while in use.

The screen hinge was never the best compared to experiences with e.g. a Macbook Air - tipping the screen a bit, or having some bumps while riding the train would wobble the screen back and forth a bit.

Replacement​

I contacted Purism support and they asked me to verify that the motherboard mounts are still ok - it's a common problem that when the screen's hinge mounts broke off, the motherboard ones follow suit:

It looks like you need a new display, however, if the screw mounts are cracked, then it will break on the keyboard side as soon as the new display is installed.

Please inspect the screw mounts for damage. If they are cracked, please prepare some epoxy glue and ensure that the screw mounts are properly aligned. Once they are aligned, please apply the glue in a couple of thin layers, letting it dry for a day or two between applications.

Support also gave me a price: USD $366.89 ($299.00 Librem 13 v3 screen, $67.89 shipping to, Germany).

My internal limit I set before contacting support was 100$, maybe plus a bit shipping, but over 300 is too much. I'll buy a new laptop, this time from a different manufacturer.

Librem 13v3 problems​

I had a number of problems with this laptop. Some of them still occur today, which is part of why I won't repair it or buy a new one from Purism:

1. Bottom case screws fell off before I ever tried to open it.

2. When waking from sleep, the laptop CPU fan sometimes blasted to full speed, while the CPU itself was awful slow.

   Could be fixed by sleeping and waking again.

3. Wifi driver stop working every now and then, spamming dmesg full of messages:

   ath: phy0: Failed to wakeup in 500us
   ath: phy0: RX failed to go idle in 10 ms RXSM=0xffffffff
   ath: phy0: DMA failed to stop in 10 ms AR_CR=0xffffffff AR_DIAG_SW=0xffffffff DMADBG_7=0xffffffff

   I had to reboot when I noticed this problem, which often was on the train to/from work.

4. Left Ctrl, Shift, S and up/down arrow keys have their black paint removed probably because of fingernails and heavy use.

   

5. Rubber foot fell off

6. Internal microphone is awful

7. The screen gets more and more grey smudges below the top screen layer, which can't be wiped off. It's like dead pixels, but in grey instead of black.

8. And now the broken hinge

What I still like are the hardware switches for webcam+microphone and bluetooth+wifi and that the system runs coreboot.

Apart from that, there is nothing that would want me get a Purism device again.