How are you launching WindowMaker?? I installed WM when I did the manual chroot installation and had little-no problem with it.. i configured the whole menu system and made the quick launch boxes just like the guy in the Video that used it. Using a terminal was relatively fast..

This debian I have used icewm (the one qole provides).. apt-get can sometimes take a while to get past the initial point.. then runs fine. Synaptic runs extremely slow for me. Firefox runs manageable.. a very long startup time; but once it's up - with the exception of 2 posts today; the rest of my relatively few posts came from within IceWeasel in IceWM. It all appears manageable to me.. This is running XChat and Pidgin from within IceWM as well.. (Why?? Because I don't like switching >.<).

Somewhere around these forums some dude posted a bunch of services you can stop to make android run faster.. I went and played with that (running it all causes IceWM to die because of how qole has integrated it with OS2008.) Shutting down most of those services causes IceWM to seriously increase on speed .. so I imagine if you do a full boot to debian it'll fly at least as fast as maemo.

Right now you need to keep the expectation that you have a 400mhz processor with 128mb ram .. and running debian within a chroot is almost like running a virtual machine with debian on it. Not quite the overhead.. but comparable IMHO. It'll always run a little slow.