His programming and social acheivements in my opinion vastly outclass installing an OS by himself, though I wonder why he doesn't do it; I assume he knows how partitioning etc. works.
And to be honest, how often do most people need to reinstall their OS? I would be surprised if he has reinstalled more than 3 times in 5 years.
Probably because the process is at best dull and at worst, a massive PITA; either way it has little to no relevance to his actual work. If I had the chance, I'd avoid any kind of software installation/maintainence as well...
Non free software is too. Especially when you start dealing with licensing. Where I work we have people assigned to licensing & other people assigned to actual install. Of course the licensing goes through a third party provider... for which we're a third party provider to our clients
ALL software does this. If it works, I might as well have let someone else do the waiting.
If it doesn't, then It requires a few hours mindlessly running around until you find some stupid flag that was set. Which I might as well leave to somebody else to do.
That this is the state of software is a pretty damn good thing, that most of it has become busywork. But its still busywork and I don't why I'd ever want to do it more than a couple times (once I know the general process)
That's if the installer is designed well and all the questions are front-loaded. Unfortunately not all installers are... Heck, I think it took Microsoft until Windows Vista to do it for the OS.
RMS ought to try installing one of the easier free OS's listed on https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html such as Trisquel (based on Ubuntu), which I think even he will find is easy to install. You don't need to know anything about partitioning if you don't care about it and don't have anything you need on your harddrive or anything else (just accept all the default options).
I'm still struggling to understand, what exactly Stallman's social acheivements are. It's not like he is the reason people care about proprietary software and surveillance. No, the real reasons are these things themselves, because — I won't say "all people", but many people understand the dangers and inconveniences of it pretty damn well. I myself perfectly agree with Stallman on many (if not all) of his convictions, but so what? I still use Android phone and many other nasty things, because it's convenient and actually less harmful than making "normal people" around you too dismiss you as some "conspiracy freak". I hate it, but I use it. Not using Facebook alone is pretty troublesome in my social life.
And GNU project software (with a few important exceptions, of course) now feels more like a legacy, than a salvation. It has it's own statute of limitations, so to say.
So I don't see how complaining without actually making a difference helps someone.
RMS created the foundations for the existence of a fully-free OS, both technically and socially. He created the concept of copyleft and the GNU GPL, a fundamental feature of the free software movement. He founded GNU and FSF which remain important enough to be notable.
Even the Linux kernel started off with a weird non-free license until Torvalds decided the GPL was a good fit, changing his views on commercial-restrictions after hearing RMS talk.
RMS is a philosopher of sorts and is already seen historically as a fundamentally important figure in the philosophy and ethics of technology.
Sure, the ideas would be out there some way even if RMS wasn't around. Similarly, biological evolution was inherently an idea that was even being thought about by others at the time of Darwin, but we still acknowledge Darwin's major contributions even though we'd almost certainly at some point know everything we know now even if Darwin had never published anything.
And to be honest, how often do most people need to reinstall their OS? I would be surprised if he has reinstalled more than 3 times in 5 years.