[koeselitz]

>> Linux won't be ready until you can download a file from the Internet, run it, and install it just with a couple clicks (and not "you need to set the 'exectuable' flag!" error).

I probably agree with a lot of your other assertions, but this seems to miss one of the central purposes of a repository-based package manager system.

Security may not be a very high priority at this moment for novice users of Linux distributions, but it will swiftly become one as Ubuntu continues to gain popularity. The old paradigm you're describing - download a solitary binary, double-click to install it across the system - is a huge security hole that Microsoft (for instance) has spent and will spend billions of dollars to patch around; the vast majority of exploits on Windows machines seem to be based on the fact that an unsuspecting user can easily download and run code that is swiftly given root access to their whole machine.

The repository system - a system where the set of programs available for easy download and installation is carefully managed and maintained - is an idea that was decades ahead of its time, and it's only just now that repositories (and their children, "app stores") are becoming a fact of life on lots of platforms. App stores are useful because they make things easier for users, but they're also extremely beneficial from a security standpoint. They also offer a simple, obvious, secure way for individual applications to be updated and patched when necessary.

tl;dr - Novice users should be strongly discouraged from downloading and installing standalone programs. This is not a feature of Windows; it's a bug. Yes, there are lots of essential Linux programs that are not available easily on the Ubuntu Software Center. The solution to that problem is to improve the repositories by adding them. Making it easier for novice users to run downloaded code blindly would be a mistake.