I do get your point, generally, but your specific example is kind of dated - I have been using GNU/Linux on my desktops for about 14 years now, and I do remember how much editing xorg.conf / xfree86.conf sucked. But it has been years since I have had to do that. The last time I checked was in Ubuntu 10.04, where xorg.conf consists only of a comment that says that xorg can detect the hardware and configure itself, making manual configuration unnecessary nearly all of the time.
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.
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):
