My own answer is that at this point, my N900s are basically pocket linux CLI computers.

I gave up on using the N900 as a phone back around 2016, when the T-Mobile cell towers in the US were transitioning in ways that were leaving me with no signal in several places.

I gave up on using the N900 for web browsing around the same year, because once I accepted having another phone, it was almost always easier to just browse on that other phone - vastly faster and most webpages actually worked.

But I continue to use the N900 regularly - it's just that the only windows I have open are X-Term. Sometimes I launch Emacs, mostly for the aesthetic, but then I close it again and go back to the `vi` that comes with busybox in an X-Term when I want to get real work done.

I've compiled new versions of the things I actually need - libressl, openssh, curl, git, etc. So I don't get TLS errors or whatever.

Point is, I barely care that what's running on my N900 is "Maemo 5" or remotely like it anymore.

In fact, I envision my future eventually looks like me booting into just framebuffer consoles, just as soon as I figure out how to do all the tricky and fancy stuff like "connecting to wifi" and "getting battery status" and "adaptive brightness" and "battery charging" on my own. Maybe when I need graphics I'll boot into a minimal X environment, perhaps with Emacs+EXWM as the window manager.

I mean in an ideal world I'd still have a modern web browser and chat/email clients on a device like the N900, but the world's moved on in a way that makes that harder to do on a device with the specs of an N900, so I've largely accepted the "pocket CLI box" role for the N900 in my life.

And having accepted this, I just want the N900 to be the best pocket linux computer with wifi for mostly CLI use that it can be.