By using auto-hiding panels of quite big size (with adequately sized icons), you can create UI that works finger-friendly, and still leaves 799x479 pixels* for applications. If you configure it correctly**, panels will always show up on top of whatever is open, but *only* when you actually press a little outside of screen, on the edge where they should appear (it feels almost like having additional capacitive buttons, but of course it's side effect of our resistive screen sensitivity - pressing just outside screen border is recognized as swinging mouse outside screen, which brings up panel). You can have 4 separate panels with different content (running programs, shortcuts, resource monitors, etc).

For Easy Debian, I found such setup most lightweight and convenient, at the same time. I see no reason why it would work differently in native Debian. BTW, it's worth to configure Openbox to start some programs without "decorations" - especially the ones that have own way of closing, minimizing, etc. Saves another bit of screen estate.

/Estel

*Works properly only with lxpanel from Jessie - earlier, some bug allowed certain applications to ignore "always on top" settings of auto-hiding panel, and, for example, Chromium was always on top.

**The -1 pixel comes from the fact, that you need to leave hidden panel size of 1 pixel (before Jessie, min was 2 pixels, now it is 0), or Panel won't come up after restart. It's a bug - it should still appear, even when 0-sized when hidden. If it's ever get fixed, we can use full 800x480 pixels for programs.

// Edit

How about power-saving? I would expect that without Maemo's hack, it will use much more power (current) when totally idle and screen is disabled,as compared to Maemo/Hildon?