10 ms·

Before clicking I thought someone kept note of how many times Linux booted in regard to their computing habits, and not testing software. I know for me I boot r

Before clicking I thought someone kept note of how many times Linux booted in regard to their computing habits, and not testing software. I know for me I boot roughly 3 times a day into different machines, do my work, shutdown, then rinse & repeat. Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate/sleep with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. Boggles my mind that people do that.

sieabahlpark 3y ago
I just have it running 24/7 and never restart for weeks. I don't even have the 100 tab problem, I just like having the immediate availability without waiting for startup.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Unless you're on solar, does wasting electricity not bother you? I used to seed a lot of stuff for years (with typical uptime measured in months), but the CO2 impact, however tiny it is in the grand scheme of things, does not seem to worth it anymore.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    If you're shutdown or hibernating, is the power draw anything compared to a lightbulb?
  - Hikikomori 3y ago
    My desktop uses 2w in sleep mode. Likely less if i disable the motherboard RGB.
  - sieabahlpark 3y ago
    [dead]
aeyes 3y ago
> Boggles my mind that people do that. :( I only reboot when my machine freezes or when updates require a reboot. I did a lot of on-call in my life and I saved tons of time by leaving everything open exactly as I left it during the day. ~> w 11:19 up 18 days, 17:03, 9 users, load averages: 3.87 2.96 2.39
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  You haven’t properly kept a machine alive until the clock rolls over. I logged into a firewalled Windows VM on EC2 that’s been running an internal micro service that was acting up and it caught my eye that task manager showed an uptime of 6 days making my mind immediately think it might be a bug caused by the recent reboot or perhaps the update that triggered it. It turns out no reboot had taken place and in fact, the uptime counter had merely rolled over - and not for the first time! Bug was unrelated to the machine and it’s still (afaik) ticking merrily away. (Our `uptime` tool for Windows [0] reported the actual time the machine was up correctly.) [0]: https://neosmart.net/uptime/ https://neosmart.net/uptime/
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Microsoft probably never anticipated needing more than a month or two of uptime, since they roll out restart-required updates more frequently than that.
  - exikyut 3y ago
    Okay, what was the actual uptime? :) (:E)
    - ComputerGuru 3y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/B0Y8h71.png https://i.imgur.com/B0Y8h71.png
trashburger 3y ago
> Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. Boggles my mind that people do that. Hey, I'm that guy (although I put it to sleep instead)! It honestly works really well and is in stark contrast to how Linux and sleep mode interacted just ~10 years ago. It's amazing for keeping your workspace intact. (FWIW, I also don't reboot or shutdown my desktop where it acts as a mainframe for my "dumb" laptop.)
Tubru3dhb22 3y ago
> Boggles my mind that people do that. Why? I only restart my (linux) laptop every 3-4 months when I update software. I can't think of any downside that I've experienced from this practice. I do a lot of work with data loaded in a REPL, so it's certainly saved me time having everything restored to as I left it.
bbarn 3y ago
I had a developer that I inherited from a previous manager some years ago. Made tons of excuses about his machine, the complexity of the problem, etc. I offered to check his machine out and he refused because it had "private stuff" on it. He had the same machine as the rest of the team, so since he hadn't made a commit in two weeks on a relatively simple problem, refused help from anyone, etc., we ultimately let him go. When we looked at his PC to see if there was anything useful from the project, his browser had around a thousand tabs open. Probably 80% of them were duplicates of other tabs, linking to the same couple stack overflow and C# sites for really basic stuff. The other 20% were... definitely "private stuff".
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > he refused because it had "private stuff" on it. There's a huge red flag. "Private stuff" (embarrassing or otherwise) shouldn't be on company machines in the first place.
  - dijit 3y ago
    I agree completely. However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. (ditto for my browsers sessions database, google cloud credentials directory etc;) I'm paranoid about it, but not enough to buy a yubikey, apparently.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      > However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. Touch the computer, sure, but please don’t touch the screen with your filthy grease fingers.
      - mdpye 3y ago
        My work laptop has a touchscreen. I've never used it, but other people use it by accident fairly often. Usually only once each though, the look of shock is sometimes even worth the fingerprint :D
ryanjshaw 3y ago
I used to shutdown regularly, then the power situation here in South Africa got so bad that we'd regularly have about 3 hours of power between interruptions. Restoring all my work every couple of hours was becoming a pain, so I decided to re-enable hibernation support on Windows for the first time in 10 years... And surprisingly it works absolutely flawlessly. Even on my 12yr old hardware, even if I'm running a few virtual machines. I honestly haven't seen any reason to reboot other than updates.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  This thread is like reading that someone is shocked that other people don't burn their beds every morning after they wake up.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > I used to shutdown regularly, then the power situation here in South Africa got so bad that we'd regularly have about 3 hours of power between interruptions. I'm in SA too, and I used to have 100s of days uptime (one even over a year and a half) ... until the regular blackouts. Had to stop using a desktop, I've resigned myself to using a laptop, purely so that I don't have to boot the thing all the time and lose my context.
rmbyrro 3y ago
I get anxious just to think that restoring from sleep/hibernation may fail and I lose all my workspace state... If there was no boot failure, nor the need to reboot after some upgrade, I'd never, ever reboot my system.
coldtea 3y ago
>Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate/sleep with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. Boggles my mind that people do that. If the OS and hardware drivers properly support sleep, you almost never need to do otherwise (except to install a new kernel driver or similar). In macOS for example it hasn't been the case that you need reboot in your regular OS use for over 10+ years. The "100+ Chrome tabs" or whatever mean nothing. They're paged out when not directly viewed anyway, and if you close just Chrome (not reboot the OS) the memory will be freed in any case...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- moron4hire 3y ago
  > If the OS and hardware drivers properly support sleep... That's like the biggest of big IFs.
  - tom_ 3y ago
    I've found sleep very reliable on macOS, and both sleep and hibernate reliable on Windows. I once had my work PC unhibernate and not pop up the login box. The computer appeared to be running normally otherwise; I just couldn't log in, and I had to tap the power button to shut it down. This stuck in my mind due to its rarity. Can't remember ever having a serious issue on macOS. A couple of my programs sometimes don't survive the sleep/wake cycle, but it's intermittent, and I'm always in the middle of something else when it happens. I've never lost any meaningful work.
    - andrekandre 3y ago
      > Can't remember ever having a serious issue on macOS. macos is fine for the most part, but there are some edge cases, such as some sketchy corporate required "security software" that eats up kernel memory or cpu for some unknown reason, a reboot can fix performance issues there also if you are a dev and apps (like xcode, android studio etc) fill your drive with cache files* or have weird background daemons that eat up cpu, at the least a logout/login (or a reboot) can fix some of those eierd things you could manually delete them without a reboot but ymmv
vbezhenar 3y ago
I think that there are two types of people. One set of people (I guess, relatively small) don't trust software and prefer to reboot OS and even periodically reinstall it to keep it "uncluttered". Another set of people prefer to run and repair it forever. I'm from the first set of people and the only reason I stopped shutting down my macbook is because I'm now keeping its lid closed (connected to display) and there's no way to turn it on without opening a lid which is very inconvenient. I still reboot it every few days, just in case.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  I’m in the second group (avoid reboots like the plague) but for the reason you attribute to the first: I never trust that my Windows machine - currently working - will reboot successfully and into the same working condition between OS update regressions, driver issues, etc.
tasuki 3y ago
> Boggles my mind that people do that. Why? It boggles my mind that you'd reboot needlessly. My uptime is usually in the hundreds of days. Sleep is good: I just close the lid. Next time I open the lid it immediately picks up where I left off. Why on earth would you want any other behaviour?
- jameson71 3y ago
  Security patching?
  - cannonpalms 3y ago
    Can all be done online, no?
    - jameson71 3y ago
      Patching the kernel requires rebooting in Linux. Kernel and many other things require rebooting on Windows.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    What do you need to reboot to patch other than the kernel? I just restart things.
    - rthnbgrredf 3y ago
      Kernel is enough attack surface to require reboot, can't ignore it.
- rolandog 3y ago
  Security-wise: encryption at rest? In high security scenarios you may be required to shutdown so you're forcing "attackers" to go through several layers: motherboard password, disk password, encryption password, OS user password + 2FA, etc.
- 2b3a51 3y ago
  Full drive encryption on Linux. I close down my laptop when I'm moving around or when I leave it somewhere while I'm in another part of the building.
andrewaylett 3y ago
Conversely, it boggles my mind that people think 100+ tabs is a lot. I've got >500 open in Firefox at the moment, they won't go away just because I reboot or upgrade. I'll probably not look at most of them again, but they're not doing any harm just sitting there waiting to be cleaned up.
- db48x 3y ago
  That's because in Firefox an open tab that you haven't recently viewed uses no memory.
eertami 3y ago
Sleep uses almost 0 power and works flawlessly. I'm never going to waste my time, however short, waiting for a machine to boot.
drbawb 3y ago
>Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate/sleep with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. I would never suspend to RAM or disk, far too error-prone in my experience. (Plus serializing out 128GiB of RAM is not great.) I just leave my machine running "all the time." My most recently retired disks (WD Black 6TB) have 309 power cycles with ~57,382 power-on hours. Seems like that works out to rebooting a little less than once per week. That tracks: I usually do kernel updates on the weekend, just in case the system doesn't want to reboot unattended.
bregma 3y ago
> Boggles my mind that people do that. $ uptime 15:39:13 up 359 days, 2:02, 16 users, load average: 0.09, 0.08, 0.15 16 users is 16 tmux sessions, all me doing different tasks.
- exikyut 3y ago
  [Cries in outdated kernel] One of the fascinating curiosities you're missing out on is Pressure Stall Information (https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html). Here's what the PSI gauges look like in htop when kernel support is available: PSI some CPU: 0.37% 0.78% 1.50% PSI some IO: 0.38% 0.33% 0.25% PSI full IO: 0.38% 0.31% 0.23% PSI some memory: 0.02% 0.04% 0.00% PSI full memory: 0.02% 0.04% 0.00%
  - E39M5S62 3y ago
    That article was written ~5 years ago. The parent comment has ~1 year of uptime. What makes you think they don't have a kernel new enough to report PSI stats?
kelnos 3y ago
Why would I ever reboot my laptop without a need to? I only reboot when there's a kernel update, or if I'm doing something where the laptop might get lost or stolen (since powering off will lock the disk encryption).

sieabahlpark 3y ago

I just have it running 24/7 and never restart for weeks. I don't even have the 100 tab problem, I just like having the immediate availability without waiting for startup.

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
Unless you're on solar, does wasting electricity not bother you? I used to seed a lot of stuff for years (with typical uptime measured in months), but the CO2 impact, however tiny it is in the grand scheme of things, does not seem to worth it anymore.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  If you're shutdown or hibernating, is the power draw anything compared to a lightbulb?
- Hikikomori 3y ago
  My desktop uses 2w in sleep mode. Likely less if i disable the motherboard RGB.
- sieabahlpark 3y ago
  [dead]

aeyes 3y ago

> Boggles my mind that people do that. :( I only reboot when my machine freezes or when updates require a reboot. I did a lot of on-call in my life and I saved tons of time by leaving everything open exactly as I left it during the day. ~> w 11:19 up 18 days, 17:03, 9 users, load averages: 3.87 2.96 2.39

ComputerGuru 3y ago
You haven’t properly kept a machine alive until the clock rolls over. I logged into a firewalled Windows VM on EC2 that’s been running an internal micro service that was acting up and it caught my eye that task manager showed an uptime of 6 days making my mind immediately think it might be a bug caused by the recent reboot or perhaps the update that triggered it. It turns out no reboot had taken place and in fact, the uptime counter had merely rolled over - and not for the first time! Bug was unrelated to the machine and it’s still (afaik) ticking merrily away. (Our `uptime` tool for Windows [0] reported the actual time the machine was up correctly.) [0]: https://neosmart.net/uptime/ https://neosmart.net/uptime/
- sgerenser 3y ago
  Microsoft probably never anticipated needing more than a month or two of uptime, since they roll out restart-required updates more frequently than that.
- exikyut 3y ago
  Okay, what was the actual uptime? :) (:E)
  - ComputerGuru 3y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/B0Y8h71.png https://i.imgur.com/B0Y8h71.png

trashburger 3y ago

> Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. Boggles my mind that people do that. Hey, I'm that guy (although I put it to sleep instead)! It honestly works really well and is in stark contrast to how Linux and sleep mode interacted just ~10 years ago. It's amazing for keeping your workspace intact. (FWIW, I also don't reboot or shutdown my desktop where it acts as a mainframe for my "dumb" laptop.)

Tubru3dhb22 3y ago

> Boggles my mind that people do that. Why? I only restart my (linux) laptop every 3-4 months when I update software. I can't think of any downside that I've experienced from this practice. I do a lot of work with data loaded in a REPL, so it's certainly saved me time having everything restored to as I left it.

bbarn 3y ago

I had a developer that I inherited from a previous manager some years ago. Made tons of excuses about his machine, the complexity of the problem, etc. I offered to check his machine out and he refused because it had "private stuff" on it. He had the same machine as the rest of the team, so since he hadn't made a commit in two weeks on a relatively simple problem, refused help from anyone, etc., we ultimately let him go. When we looked at his PC to see if there was anything useful from the project, his browser had around a thousand tabs open. Probably 80% of them were duplicates of other tabs, linking to the same couple stack overflow and C# sites for really basic stuff. The other 20% were... definitely "private stuff".

JohnFen 3y ago
> he refused because it had "private stuff" on it. There's a huge red flag. "Private stuff" (embarrassing or otherwise) shouldn't be on company machines in the first place.
- dijit 3y ago
  I agree completely. However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. (ditto for my browsers sessions database, google cloud credentials directory etc;) I'm paranoid about it, but not enough to buy a yubikey, apparently.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    > However if anyone touches my computer: don't you dare f*%king touch my private key. Touch the computer, sure, but please don’t touch the screen with your filthy grease fingers.
    - mdpye 3y ago
      My work laptop has a touchscreen. I've never used it, but other people use it by accident fairly often. Usually only once each though, the look of shock is sometimes even worth the fingerprint :D

ryanjshaw 3y ago

I used to shutdown regularly, then the power situation here in South Africa got so bad that we'd regularly have about 3 hours of power between interruptions. Restoring all my work every couple of hours was becoming a pain, so I decided to re-enable hibernation support on Windows for the first time in 10 years... And surprisingly it works absolutely flawlessly. Even on my 12yr old hardware, even if I'm running a few virtual machines. I honestly haven't seen any reason to reboot other than updates.

pessimizer 3y ago
This thread is like reading that someone is shocked that other people don't burn their beds every morning after they wake up.
lelanthran 3y ago
> I used to shutdown regularly, then the power situation here in South Africa got so bad that we'd regularly have about 3 hours of power between interruptions. I'm in SA too, and I used to have 100s of days uptime (one even over a year and a half) ... until the regular blackouts. Had to stop using a desktop, I've resigned myself to using a laptop, purely so that I don't have to boot the thing all the time and lose my context.

rmbyrro 3y ago

I get anxious just to think that restoring from sleep/hibernation may fail and I lose all my workspace state... If there was no boot failure, nor the need to reboot after some upgrade, I'd never, ever reboot my system.

coldtea 3y ago

>Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate/sleep with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. Boggles my mind that people do that. If the OS and hardware drivers properly support sleep, you almost never need to do otherwise (except to install a new kernel driver or similar). In macOS for example it hasn't been the case that you need reboot in your regular OS use for over 10+ years. The "100+ Chrome tabs" or whatever mean nothing. They're paged out when not directly viewed anyway, and if you close just Chrome (not reboot the OS) the memory will be freed in any case...

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
moron4hire 3y ago
> If the OS and hardware drivers properly support sleep... That's like the biggest of big IFs.
- tom_ 3y ago
  I've found sleep very reliable on macOS, and both sleep and hibernate reliable on Windows. I once had my work PC unhibernate and not pop up the login box. The computer appeared to be running normally otherwise; I just couldn't log in, and I had to tap the power button to shut it down. This stuck in my mind due to its rarity. Can't remember ever having a serious issue on macOS. A couple of my programs sometimes don't survive the sleep/wake cycle, but it's intermittent, and I'm always in the middle of something else when it happens. I've never lost any meaningful work.
  - andrekandre 3y ago
    > Can't remember ever having a serious issue on macOS. macos is fine for the most part, but there are some edge cases, such as some sketchy corporate required "security software" that eats up kernel memory or cpu for some unknown reason, a reboot can fix performance issues there also if you are a dev and apps (like xcode, android studio etc) fill your drive with cache files* or have weird background daemons that eat up cpu, at the least a logout/login (or a reboot) can fix some of those eierd things you could manually delete them without a reboot but ymmv

vbezhenar 3y ago

I think that there are two types of people. One set of people (I guess, relatively small) don't trust software and prefer to reboot OS and even periodically reinstall it to keep it "uncluttered". Another set of people prefer to run and repair it forever. I'm from the first set of people and the only reason I stopped shutting down my macbook is because I'm now keeping its lid closed (connected to display) and there's no way to turn it on without opening a lid which is very inconvenient. I still reboot it every few days, just in case.

ComputerGuru 3y ago
I’m in the second group (avoid reboots like the plague) but for the reason you attribute to the first: I never trust that my Windows machine - currently working - will reboot successfully and into the same working condition between OS update regressions, driver issues, etc.

tasuki 3y ago

> Boggles my mind that people do that. Why? It boggles my mind that you'd reboot needlessly. My uptime is usually in the hundreds of days. Sleep is good: I just close the lid. Next time I open the lid it immediately picks up where I left off. Why on earth would you want any other behaviour?

jameson71 3y ago
Security patching?
- cannonpalms 3y ago
  Can all be done online, no?
  - jameson71 3y ago
    Patching the kernel requires rebooting in Linux. Kernel and many other things require rebooting on Windows.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  What do you need to reboot to patch other than the kernel? I just restart things.
  - rthnbgrredf 3y ago
    Kernel is enough attack surface to require reboot, can't ignore it.
rolandog 3y ago
Security-wise: encryption at rest? In high security scenarios you may be required to shutdown so you're forcing "attackers" to go through several layers: motherboard password, disk password, encryption password, OS user password + 2FA, etc.
2b3a51 3y ago
Full drive encryption on Linux. I close down my laptop when I'm moving around or when I leave it somewhere while I'm in another part of the building.

andrewaylett 3y ago

Conversely, it boggles my mind that people think 100+ tabs is a lot. I've got >500 open in Firefox at the moment, they won't go away just because I reboot or upgrade. I'll probably not look at most of them again, but they're not doing any harm just sitting there waiting to be cleaned up.

db48x 3y ago
That's because in Firefox an open tab that you haven't recently viewed uses no memory.

eertami 3y ago

Sleep uses almost 0 power and works flawlessly. I'm never going to waste my time, however short, waiting for a machine to boot.

drbawb 3y ago

>Then you have those types who put their machine into hibernate/sleep with 100+ Chrome tabs open and never do a full boot ritual. I would never suspend to RAM or disk, far too error-prone in my experience. (Plus serializing out 128GiB of RAM is not great.) I just leave my machine running "all the time." My most recently retired disks (WD Black 6TB) have 309 power cycles with ~57,382 power-on hours. Seems like that works out to rebooting a little less than once per week. That tracks: I usually do kernel updates on the weekend, just in case the system doesn't want to reboot unattended.

bregma 3y ago

> Boggles my mind that people do that. $ uptime 15:39:13 up 359 days, 2:02, 16 users, load average: 0.09, 0.08, 0.15 16 users is 16 tmux sessions, all me doing different tasks.

exikyut 3y ago
[Cries in outdated kernel] One of the fascinating curiosities you're missing out on is Pressure Stall Information (https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html https://docs.kernel.org/accounting/psi.html). Here's what the PSI gauges look like in htop when kernel support is available: PSI some CPU: 0.37% 0.78% 1.50% PSI some IO: 0.38% 0.33% 0.25% PSI full IO: 0.38% 0.31% 0.23% PSI some memory: 0.02% 0.04% 0.00% PSI full memory: 0.02% 0.04% 0.00%
- E39M5S62 3y ago
  That article was written ~5 years ago. The parent comment has ~1 year of uptime. What makes you think they don't have a kernel new enough to report PSI stats?

kelnos 3y ago

Why would I ever reboot my laptop without a need to? I only reboot when there's a kernel update, or if I'm doing something where the laptop might get lost or stolen (since powering off will lock the disk encryption).