I'd say he's known for Linux and the building the base of TiVo, then Android, Chromebook, and MacOS (all of those impressions are wrong, but bear with me).

Most people don't know what the kernel is, but they do see user space, and that was largely GPLed for a while. I think IBM ran some super bowl ads about how amazing Linux and open source were, about ten years ago.

Also, stuff like raspberry pi and ssh exploits (yes, BSD, I know) also show up in pop culture. The Matrix and Mr Robot come to mind. During the end of the dot com boom, I think people were largely aware that Apache + Linux were what things ran on.