I missed that note about the kernel. Thanks!

Another issue I came across, at least if you want to use the N900 as a phone is the power consumption. On Debian it needs about 10x the power it needs on Maemo which results in a battery lifetime of about 6 hours.

Sure, this is with wifi (and maybe some other components) always on and there are probably some kernel tweaks missing and the userland isn't configured for saving power either, so I was expecting a higher power consumption. And it would certainly be much better if suspend to RAM worked, but factor 10 is still quite a lot.