I tried out postmarketOS + phosh on a PinePhone about a year ago. For my own needs, it worked fairly well, except (ironically) receiving calls. It was like driving an old car, everything was slightly jank, but worked, and could be tinkered with - see the entire review. I have to give credit that there has been impressive progress in mobile Linux since PinePhone’s release in 2019, and a lot of it was developed by unpaid hobbyists.

I don’t watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.

Biktor and Lynxis will be working on OpenIMSd, which aims to bring VoLTE (4G voice calls) to Qualcomm based phones (like the PinePhone)

This is fantastic news, and I wish them all the best. Reliable VoLTE/WoWiFi calls was my main (but obviously major) issue with the PinePhone.

Another FYI: Ubuntu Touch does not support VoLTE at all, thus it might be more difficult to use it in some networks and countries (for example, USA shut down 3G some years ago)

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the responsive UI, the browser, and Cinny (the Matrix Client)

You might enjoy N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. The setting at first appears as fantasy, but there is a sci-fi-like depth to everything. The climate and periodic catastrophic Seasons, the tectonics, orogeny (humans’ magic-like abilities to manipulate heat and tectonics), and “high-tech” of the world’s past history.

I was interested in these “light” phones for a bit, but they seem a bit gimmicky and expensive. I understand not having a browser on purpose, but for communication, none of them (AFAIK) support Matrix or even XMPP (even some old feature phones had a Java Jabber client). Punkt MP02 supports Signal though.

Android phone with custom ROM (Lineage, /e/, Graphene, DivestOS…) is a possibility, and would be usable until hardware is incompatible with the phone/wifi networks.

If you have a patience of a saint, PinePhone and Librem5 are Linux phones, both in fairly early stages.

Hype still sells and we still idolize people though. Businessmen such as Steve Jobs or (early) Elon Musk curate an image of themselves as a “genius”, which leads to popularity of their products and influences trends and opinions in specific fields.

Really though, no single person did or invented anything alone. Every well-known and highly regarded scientist, inventor, or businessman built their work as a small increment on top of hundreds of predecessors. The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow is a good pop-sci book that carries that point throughout.