Purism had a bizarre falling out with their former CTO. I am inclined to believe the CTO [1].
The documentation is basically non-existent. There is no end to end hardware tear down, at least a fully complete one, which I found kind of shocking. The special privacy first operating system is a very lightly modified Ubuntu OS. System76's popOS, almost a clone itself of Ubuntu, is probably more customized.
The manufacturing seemed shoddy, although not terrible. Just a lot of air-space when opening the thing and pieces jiggle around a little too much.
The USB keys they send you are awesome (micro usb, usb c, and usb A in the same key!) and I wish more vendors did the PGP smart card setup they do.
In general the German open source movement has grown...strange...the last two years. Recently I was shown that one of the main contributors to the a small but important part of the Linux library that handles multimode to Usb devices...runs an overpopulation Institute that reminds me of the bad guy from the James Bond movie Moonraker [2]. They also added a "HuaweiAltModeGlobal" which causes no end of trouble for anyone in the networking field who commonly uses say tcpdump and USB router sticks.
[1] - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...