Wait, don't you mean the *first* one?

Yet Bush won. Twice.

Fat binaries are awesome, they're what makes Mac OS X the mainstream operating system with the most painless 64-bit transition. Whereas Windows and Linux use messy hacks to allow 32-bit apps to live in a 64-bit environment, in OS X it "just works" because all libraries are multi-architecture in a completely transparent way thanks to fat binaries. It also made the transition from PPC to x86 relatively easy, too.

I feel sorry for people who believe Linux doesn't need fat binaries. They don't understand all the advantages this system brings (and not just to non-free software).

If I'm reading you correctly, what you're saying is that because the source is available, it's perfectly acceptable to expect the end user to compile everything? I can already hear you say "no, the end user should use his distro's package manager". But the hard reality is that your distro's package manager doesn't have everything. Eventually you always end up with some program that's not being maintained by your distro. Hence the forced compiling of stuff.

The end user should NEVER have to compile stuff to use it. EVER. (except for experimental code not ready for release) People need to get that silly idea out of their heads if they ever want Linux to become a relevant desktop operating system.

Fat binaries would be just as useful for open source apps as closed ones.

Great... except having to compile an app to install it is a fucking waste of the user's time. And the performance gains from CPU specific compile flags are insignificant. Why is this a better idea than fat binaries again?

Are you a Gentoo user? I used to be a Gentoo user too. Then I actually became sane.

He doesn't need to elaborate. Your continued narrow thinking has just proved his point. But if you want to live in denial, your choice.