Yeah. The xorg.conf file was a little old example. Though I keep coming back to Linux every few years to check, and the 'making executable an executable' problem is still there from my very recent experience (like 3 to 4 months back). Right at the time I was being impressed by how easy it was to isntall Ubuntu from my Windows partition, I couldn't believe when one of the professional products we use in our office had these official installation instructions for Linux: "1) Download the file, 2) go to the command prompt and make it executable by typing <whatever>" ... Now I understand it might be that the product makers haven't updated themselves, but it's definitely a turn of for a lot of people.

So you'd prefer to be able to just double click to run any downloaded "executable"?

But anyway, the problem you described is the fault of your vendor, not "Linux".

Yes, when I and the vendor both know it's supposed to be an executable. What a smart question. Also, an application is only as dumb as the OS allows it to be.

Here's how I installed Chrome/TeamViewer/VirtualBox/SublimeText3/etc:

I went to the website, downloaded a .deb file, double-clicked the downloaded file, clicked the big install button in the Ubuntu Software Center window that it spawned, entered my password, waiting a few seconds aaaaand it's installed. I can now run the application by clicking the big Ubuntu button on my sidebar (or pressing the Windows/symbol key) and typing in the first few letters of its name. I can optionally drag the icon to my sidebar for quicker access.

Here's how I installed the last couple of applications that didn't have a .deb file (mostly development builds of games and developer-targeted applications):

I went to the website, downloaded the .tar.gz/.tar.bz2/.zip file for my platform, double-clicked the downloaded archive to extract it to a new folder in my home folder, opened the folder and located and double-clicked the executable.

Perforce, one of the very famous Source Control Systems tells us to install its software like this (Hint: making the executables 'executables'. On Windows it's a direct executable): http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/p4sag/c... . I remember because I did it very recently.

Thousands of other software do the same. Examples (compare the installation instructions for Windows v/s Linux/UNIX for all these pages below):

MOPEX [http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/SPITZER/docs/dataanalysist...]

Multibit [http://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_installing.html ]

Octoshape [https://support.octoshape.com/entries/21488922-Octoshape-App...]

UNetbootin [http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/]

Tuxboot [http://tuxboot.org/installation/]

You listed a few major ones which work the desired way, while there's a sea of applications which make Linux still look archaic.