I noticed when I played with my backup librem 5 instead of my daily driver that the feel of the WiFi switch on the backup one is different. It seems to click very firmly into place. But on my daily driver, it moves a little more easily. Is it possible that switching it daily can eventually wear it out?
What other issues have folks faced after heavy use of Librem 5’s for long periods of time? Were they similarly only aesthetic? I think for me, the only other big failure has been the back plate tearing from repeat use attaching and detaching it, but that was all solved by using a 3rd party backplate manufactured to be more resilient and more easily removable. (I pop it off and on daily with no issue now.)
The 3.5mm jack on my Librem 5 USA is more loose, so using stereo interconnect cables or headset microphones are unreliable unless I apply external pressure onto the plug itself.
I also have a problem with that, I think it happened when I had something plugged in while the phone was in my pocket and I was running and moving around a lot, so it got pulled from side to side and got a bit worn out like that.
So now it’s loose, it works if you don’t touch it but even a little touch sideways makes the headphones stop working, then another little touch and they work again. I wonder how hard it would be to open it up and repair that in some way.
The jack is a piece of plastic that has metal strips in a cylindrical shape for the contacts. You can probably use a very small screwdriver or similar to very gently try to push on the metal strips to get them to better contact, but be careful not to bend them too much out of shape. As you can see from image, there are small holes to do this but I can’t determine from that if all the strips can be accessed by them, or if you might need to make additional holes.
The three sliding switches are part of the motherboard, so if those brake, you’d probably want to replace the whole board - it’s not easy (cheap) to get those replaced [trying to figure out something positive: maybe we’ll get those upgrade boards with more memory to replace them, someday?]. It would be a whole lot of easier fix if the fault would be on switch hats/caps (not sure about the term) being loose (the part that your touching, which is not the actual switch).
The age on my L5 shows on the aluminum frame around the edges. Lots of dings and scrapes.
Buttons and switches for me all still work well.
The screen protector has kept the screen fine, at least.
And, of course, my speaker stopped working some time back (the Speaker one, not the Handset) but I’ve just been kinda ignoring that.
Most of the wear on my L5 is with the paint on the frame near the HKS has worn away from frequent use. They are a little easier to trigger but not in any major way as to make them unreliable for use.
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