Assuming that this is a tinkerer/hobby project and you know your odds of getting a daily-driver phone out of it aren't good:
You can get various Pi add-ons and USB-addressable cards that supposedly have texting and/or voice call capability. Look up a company called Sixfab. How well they work in practice, I don't know. Be prepared to immerse yourself in a large manual of AT commands and cell phone protocol stuff.
There are Douglas DC3s still flying in commercial service (not many, but a few). Those were built in the 1940s. 2004 is not all that old a plane.
At the rate they're going, they're gonna have to start designing four-winged planes.
It says something about the state of politics in this country that Trudeau's ability to sometimes admit that the dead fish he's just been slapped across the face with is a dead fish and not some fiendish rubber weapon created by the opposition in order to distract people from [insert unpopular Conservative thing here] makes me think more highly of him.
Installing Gentoo requires you to 1. follow a long list of instructions (correctly, in order, without skipping) and 2. be willing to make some decisions about your system setup. I don't consider that painful, but some people apparently do. It's also useful to bring a book or some other secondary form of entertainment to occupy yourself with during the non-interactive parts of the install process. Once the initial install is done, you can minimize wasted time by starting updates right before leaving the computer, or just configure it to always leave one core free for your interactive needs.
Gentoo has never been an appropriate distribution for new Linux users with no technical background, or people who want their system to "just work" without caring about how. It's always been about choice, and its flexibility is both a strength and a weakness. Regardless, the OP did the correct thing by not including it in their guide.
Actually, what really matters is not the quality of your code or the disruptiveness of your paradigm, or whether you can outlive the competitors that existed when you started up, but whether you can keep the money coming. The rideshares in particular will fail over time in any country with labour laws that allow drivers to unionize—if the drivers make a sane amount of money, the company's profits plummet, and investors and shareholders head for the hills. Netflix is falling apart already because the corporations with large libraries of content aren't so happy to license them anymore, and they're scrambling to make up the revenue they've lost. Google will probably survive only because its real product is the scourge of humanity known as advertising.
Again, it's all business considerations, not technical ones. Remember the dot-com boom of the 1990s, or are you not old enough? A lot of what's going on right now looks like the 2.0 (3.0? 4.0?) release of the same thing. A few of these companies will survive, but more of them will fold, and in some cases their business models will go with them.
You'd lose that wager, actually—this area has at least two taxi companies but no ride shares (Uber and Lyft have very little penetration in Canada outside a few specific cities), and our household does subscribe to a standard cable TV package, although it's mostly for the benefit of my elderly mother. Those companies have not been nearly as disruptive as some people think they have.
(As for Google's search engine, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole these days. And Yahoo and AltaVista both sucked even when they were popular—I preferred InfoSeek, back in the day.)
Which have all descended, or are in the process of descending, into suckitude because of business issues rather than technical ones. And trying to replace programmers with LLMs is fundamentally a business issue.
I will have to remember not to use that command anymore. 'Scuse me while I clean up the hairball . . .
Hmm. "Couldn't rule out" ≠ "does". I can understand wanting to hold a claim of damage to a slightly higher standard of proof. I can also understand wanting to err on the side of caution.
On trhe one hand, this looks like a nothingburger to me—likely this stuff is no more dangerous than, say, table salt (which no one expects to completely remove from processed foods even though it has known medical risks associated with it).
On the other hand, titanium dioxide is just a colourant, so taking it out doesn't alter the food in any way that matters.
🤷
It takes a few seconds to type a password in manually as well, but people seem to regard the time differently if they're actively doing something than if they're passively waiting for something to happen. Nontechnical users regard computers and other devices as black boxes that should respond instantly to stimuli, the way purely analog equipment does. If it doesn't, many of them treat it as broken.
If you're really against Pis, you could get one of the USB-controlled modules and try hooking it up to something like a LattePanda, but that's going to be more expensive.
You could also theoretically get a cell modem chip from a company like Quectel and design the supporting add-on board yourself for any SBC of your choice, but I suspect that's further down the rabbit hole than you want to go.
So, yeah, the Pi is probably the smartest choice if you really want to do your own hardware build instead of just buying a PinePhone.