The pragmatic Richard that wrote that book is long gone I'm afraid.
Today his blog is filled with weird rants against voter ID, the Iran conflict, and a list of other countries he dislikes because they have national ID cards and this is a bad thing apparently.
For someone who is a renowned world traveler, you would think he has heard of passports by now.
Not a peep about these bills that could have a very real impact on an operating system he invented (gah-noo).
Then again, since he's never installed it himself*, account creation is not something he would have to deal with or care about.
When I need to use my computer, I'm not thinking about someone else's crusade. I have crusades of my own to fail miserably at and I need all the help I can get from whatever products function best.
Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago.
Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken.
And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists).
Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.