If you haven't already, you may benefit from reflashing with this patched firmware that fixes various issues for keyboard and trackpad:

https://github.com/jackhumbert/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater

I haven't had any problems with the trackpad. It's not a great trackpad, but it works and no drift.

Idk why phosh is so slow on the pinephone. Just about any other (x11 anyway) DE was fast on it even before the updated drivers a few months ago.

I think the other issue though is that on the nokia GTK was still built with software rendering in mind whereas modern graphics toolkits tend to do the "everything has OpenGL and stuff without it can use LLVMPIPE" thing which results in very poor performance on incompatible hardware (along with less than optimal drawing in order to fit the abstraction.)

Maemo 5 was (mostly) based on GTK2, and GTK3 so far was never running on such underpowered hardware, so you're most likely seeing plenty of bottlenecks that nobody really looked into optimizing because they weren't bottlenecking anything on hardware the devs used. It's even much snappier on the Librem 5 (which has almost three times as fast RAM as the PinePhone) without any changes whatsoever.

Also, it does take about 3-4 seconds to open the settings app on my Nokia N900 as well - it just makes it seem like it opens instantly with a splash screen that mimics the open app :)

Hmm... I wonder if those expensive effects could be cached to a texture atlas to mitigate the performance impact. Hopefully the devs are looking into it!