I appreciate your enthusiasm, but if you'd just slow down a little, your post would be a little more readable
The items you seek are v.92 modems. Yes, they exist, and in relatively great number. My iBook 600 (Late 2001) has one.
Zoom makes a relatively good one. It's an internal PCI device, and it's a full hardware-based modem, and not a cruddy Winmodem. It'll run you about $65 or $70.
Here's the kicker. Your phone company and ISP both have to support it for the call hold feature to work. If they don't, then you've got nothing more than an expensive v.90 modem.
And the Gimp... better than Photoshop? Uh... nah, sorry, man. I occasionally have to send stuff to print shops (I'm an indy musician and I've made two sets of album art for CDs that never got finished) and if I'd used Gimp, I couldn't have done it right, as it has no CMYK support. Someone that knows... does Gimp even do HSV?
How many chat clients? How many browsers? I have two chat clients and a browser. I only need one at a time. I guess that's the difference in the Mac way and the Linux way, eh?
BTW: There's no Photoshop 8. 7 is the latest release