Linus Torvalds has apparently met Bill Gates for the first time in person and before you ask, no he didn't clock him in the face

Linus Torvalds with a super-imposed thumbs up — (Image credit: Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship)

Time has a funny way of changing people's views. Anger and mistrust can often fade into mild scepticism, and once bitter rivals can sometimes develop a healthy understanding. This certainly seems to be true of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and his thoughts on Microsoft and Windows in general. And just recently, the famous coder apparently got to meet Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, for the very first time in person and not a single fisticuff was to be seen.

The meeting itself was a dinner hosted by Microsoft's chief technical officer, Mark Russinovich, and he showed off a snap of his guests on a LinkedIn post (via Sweclockers). "I had the thrill of a lifetime, hosting dinner for Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and David Cutler," he wrote. "Linus had never met Bill, and Dave had never met Linus. No major kernel decisions were made, but maybe next dinner."

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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?

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