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> For example, I never let my wife’s Windows 7 machine go for more than about two weeks without restarting it, whereas I reboot my Linux box only every few mont

> For example, I never let my wife’s Windows 7 machine go for more than about two weeks without restarting it, whereas I reboot my Linux box only every few months. One time I had a job doing software development on Windows 3.1 and my computer generally had to be rebooted at least twice a day if it was to continue working. Of the half-dozen Windows laptops that I’ve owned, none of them could reliably suspend/resume ten times without being rebooted. I realized to my astonishment last week that despite using my Macbook for 12+ hours of coding nearly every day, I had not rebooted it in nearly four months! This only became clear when I did an OS update that needed a reboot.

mrguyorama 8y ago
I have to reboot my work macbook routinely, otherwise the WiFi gets flakey, to the point that the wifi will drop every ten minutes and need to have its DHCP lease renewed to function again. It also gets entirely taken over by apps that decide to use up 100% of the CPU and MacOSX has no problem letting them, to the point that javascript in Firefox begins to struggle to get any cycles of its own, and electron apps also see this degradation. Occasionally when I try to wake it from sleep, the computer wakes up and begins processing keyboard and mouse events, but the screensaver stays on top of the whole screen, ignoring any attempt to dismiss it. I once installed an ubuntu VM. I then installed Java and Eclipse to work on a C project I downloaded, and was greeted by all fonts on system windows magically tripling in size and not being able to find a settings window to fix it anywhere. I had to reinstall. The whole process from initial install to un-usability was less than two hours Meanwhile, my windows 7 desktop and windows 2012r2 server run 24/7, reboot once a month on patch tuesday, and are rock-freaking-solid. Despite the fact that they both see more diverse and stranger work than the macbook. Despite using spinning rust Hard Drives in both, they are more responsive and reliable under load than my macbook, and show no signs of misbehavior even when a bug in a video editor I use cause the graphics driver to lock up and hard crash (IN KERNEL SPACE) repeatedly, recovering with just a slight warning. I'll never understand the "mac is reliable" ideology.
- hellofunk 8y ago
  Strange luck you've had there. Odd. I've owned three Macs over many years, and at least in my own experience, they have been the most reliable machines I've owned in the twenty years I've been developing. I still have a 2011 13-inch MBP that despite a hard drive replacement is still whirring along fine. My main dev machine is a 15-inch 2016 model that is the most dependable I've personally experienced.
- arbie 8y ago
  > I have to reboot my work macbook routinely, otherwise the WiFi gets flakey, to the point that the wifi will drop every ten minutes and need to have its DHCP lease renewed to function again. I have this exact problem when reconnecting to a corporate hardline.

mrguyorama 8y ago

I have to reboot my work macbook routinely, otherwise the WiFi gets flakey, to the point that the wifi will drop every ten minutes and need to have its DHCP lease renewed to function again. It also gets entirely taken over by apps that decide to use up 100% of the CPU and MacOSX has no problem letting them, to the point that javascript in Firefox begins to struggle to get any cycles of its own, and electron apps also see this degradation. Occasionally when I try to wake it from sleep, the computer wakes up and begins processing keyboard and mouse events, but the screensaver stays on top of the whole screen, ignoring any attempt to dismiss it. I once installed an ubuntu VM. I then installed Java and Eclipse to work on a C project I downloaded, and was greeted by all fonts on system windows magically tripling in size and not being able to find a settings window to fix it anywhere. I had to reinstall. The whole process from initial install to un-usability was less than two hours Meanwhile, my windows 7 desktop and windows 2012r2 server run 24/7, reboot once a month on patch tuesday, and are rock-freaking-solid. Despite the fact that they both see more diverse and stranger work than the macbook. Despite using spinning rust Hard Drives in both, they are more responsive and reliable under load than my macbook, and show no signs of misbehavior even when a bug in a video editor I use cause the graphics driver to lock up and hard crash (IN KERNEL SPACE) repeatedly, recovering with just a slight warning. I'll never understand the "mac is reliable" ideology.

hellofunk 8y ago
Strange luck you've had there. Odd. I've owned three Macs over many years, and at least in my own experience, they have been the most reliable machines I've owned in the twenty years I've been developing. I still have a 2011 13-inch MBP that despite a hard drive replacement is still whirring along fine. My main dev machine is a 15-inch 2016 model that is the most dependable I've personally experienced.
arbie 8y ago
> I have to reboot my work macbook routinely, otherwise the WiFi gets flakey, to the point that the wifi will drop every ten minutes and need to have its DHCP lease renewed to function again. I have this exact problem when reconnecting to a corporate hardline.