I've read conflicting reports on how much more powerful it is in practice. I've seen only one direct review that said the Librem is clearly much faster, but I've also seen a few comparisons that show little to no difference in daily use tasks.

The problem might be that we don't have a quality comparison yet (or I haven't found it), but I wonder if there is a performance bottle neck in the hardware. Maybe the software is still better optimized for the pine and the Librem will start to pull ahead as more developers get a chance to work on it.

Librem 5 has much more powerful hardware regardless of software optimizations: https://forums.puri.sm/t/comparing-specs-of-upcoming-linux-p....

It just depends on what your "daily use tasks" are.

In term of CPU, the hardware is similarly shitty. For the GPU, the Librem 5 has a better GPU. In plasma mobile, the current bottleneck is on the GPU side, so maybe the Librem 5 can offer better performance but I'm not sure the improvements are worth $600 more.

In practice, the biggest difference comes from RAM speed, which Librem 5 has almost three times as fast as PinePhone. Then, the CPU is clocked at 1.3x the speed and it has twice the L2 cache. eMMC is faster too. The difference in every day usage is easily noticeable even just by how fast applications start and, indeed, the GPU performance difference is drastic: https://social.librem.one/@dos/104767475144787918

Recently I've compiled GTK4 on both phones and it took my PinePhone almost twice as long as my Librem 5.

Disclaimer: I work for Purism on the Librem 5, although I'm very excited with the PinePhone as well - I'd say it's good for its price.

Startup times will probably change quite a lot for apps that use the GPU. I've noticed some performance work being done recently around startup times.

Sure - there's a lot that can be done there; but that will also make it faster on L5 :)

Some of this is lima specific, so not really.

Ah right. Almost none of the GTK3 apps use the GPU though (but GTK4 does use it, so that's going to be relevant for GTK apps soon).