10 ms·

Have you restarted your computer this week?

• VaderAi 4mo ago
  Surely it must make a difference if you have a standard hard drive or a solid state drive. Whats the percentage of solid state drives out there?
  • hdgvhicv 4mo ago
    Why?
• jorisw 4mo ago
  So what’s the actual benefit to rebooting according to this article?
  • 14 4mo ago
    It gives you a chance to go to the bathroom of course.
• roli64 4mo ago
  No I power it off first and then I start it up again
  • iamtedd 4mo ago
    For Windows, this may not be enough: https://m.majorgeeks.com/content/page/the_truth_about_windows_fast_startup_leave_it_on_or_turn_it_off.html https://m.majorgeeks.com/content/page/the_truth_about_window...
    • zetanor 4mo ago
      Indeed, power off and power on sometimes doesn't even reset uptime.
  • IAmBroom 4mo ago
    My understanding for Win10 was that Restart was "more complete" than rebooting by a manual power-off/power-on. Found it: "By default, Windows computers use a "Fast Startup" feature when you click Shut Down." It actually performs a sort of hibernate, saving state data of the system (but not necessarily of all running programs - that's another setting). Restart clears those state registers and begins a new, fresh Windows session. So, ideally: Perform a Restart, not Shut Down, at the end of your day.
• mrhottakes 4mo ago
  Yes, a few times. Thank you for asking, I hope you restart your computer some as well. :)
• gonzalohm 4mo ago
  I don't have any data to prove it but I think Mac users don't bother "cleaning up" after they are done with their computers. I think windows and Linux users usually shut down their laptops when they are done. I believe this is because of how Mac is designed, nothing really closes. You close an app and it's just "minimized". Same behavior as with the lid, you close the lid and it suspends. If I recall correctly, at some point, this also affected the iPhone, you were not able to "fully close" apps and they decided to add a screen so you could swipe and "close" the app (some run in the background, same as android)
  • vidarh 4mo ago
    As a Linux user, it pisses me off whenever I am forced to reboot, and I'm very disappointed if my laptop uptime is measured in less than months. Needing to shut down to me indicates something is broken.
    • gonzalohm 4mo ago
      What can possibly require a laptop to be up for months? I have a Linux server that can run for years without needing a reboot. But my laptop I just shut it down after my work is done
      • flowerbreeze 4mo ago
        Different reasons. Mine is on the table and I use it more like a desktop. It will just idle when I'm not around, because I come and go often. My current uptime shows on Debian 30 days, 49 min. Although... 30 days is maybe a bit misleading, because I ran some heavy shaders without thinking that triggered the GPU watchdog and forced me out of my session. I think killing all user processes is almost like a reboot, although not according to uptime.
      • vidarh 4mo ago
        Not having to stop sessions of all kinds of things and restart them for no good reason. It doesn't require it to stay up, and if things were better at retaining state across restarts I would care less, but it's a nuisance to have to log back into things, and get things back exactly how I left them. I often have half a dozen projects up on different virtual desktops, and leaving them how they were when I worked on it last makes it easier to get back up to speed. EDIT: I used to leave screen sessions running on servers instead, as the workaround to having to reboot my local machine. But it's nice not to need to.
• mikestew 4mo ago
  ‘“Microsoft Edge is preve…” Bam! Force quit! Kill kill kill!’ Wait, what? Why is OP using Edge on a Mac? To each their own, it just caught me as odd. And, as Betteridge’s Corollary or whatever demands, the answer to the headline is “no”. Is this like ancient wisdom about batteries, you’ve got to run them to zero once in a while or they’ll get a “memory”? (Which, of course, hasn’t been true for, like, twenty years.)
  • murderingmurloc 4mo ago
    I've seen a lot of discussion on this recently but I'm not a mac user so my opinion isn't very relevant. Here's a recent recap though <https://windowsforum.com/threads/microsoft-edge-on-mac-wins-users-trust-as-best-freakin-browser-goes-viral.431535/ https://windowsforum.com/threads/microsoft-edge-on-mac-wins-...>
• 0xEnsp1re 4mo ago
  Ever since I got my MacBook, I've only restarted it about twice a month. With Windows, I used to restart my pc/laptop almost every time I finished using it.
  • spogbiper 4mo ago
    my department manages a fleet of ~10k Windows PCs and it's pulling teeth to get the users to allow an automated reboot once a month for updates. they invent all kinds of silly ways to avoid it. your situation seems atypical.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• felix-the-cat 4mo ago
  I have a Lenovo Legion and a Macbook Pro - I've had to restart the mac a couple of times due to VPN issues with work, but the Lenovo has probably been running for a few months.
• ck2 4mo ago
  aren't there other old-school people like me that shut down everything at end of day and restart the next? can't be hacked if it's completely off can't get struck by lightning or surges if the surge-strip is flipped off fans and spinning drives have lifetime on motors
  • 1970-01-01 4mo ago
    >can't get struck by lightning or surges if the surge-strip is flipped off That's not how electricity works. Hot may be open but your ground and return is not.
    • ck2 4mo ago
      that's an interesting thought but would violate physics for lightning to come in through the ground line?
      • cwillu 4mo ago
        “Ground is 0v everywhere” is a rule of thumb with a surprisingly limited scope of validity, not physics.
      • 1970-01-01 4mo ago
        No. This isn't some theoretical Star Trek neutrino emissions scenario. Lightning punches-out wherever it hits, including ground, which is directly connected to neutral.
        • genewitch 4mo ago
          i think this isn't common knowledge; as it's only tied at one panel, and separate in the other (in the US); so there's two busses in the main breaker panel, one for white and one for green/bare. It's only the utility/ingress panel that has the neutral and ground bonded. It's a fluke of the way we deliver power in the US, split phase, maybe.
      • lgeorget 4mo ago
• assimpleaspossi 4mo ago
  FreeBSD is my daily driver and I only reboot for major upgrades (which is required). I never power off cause I work on it, off and on, throughout the day and night (for my own company).
  • doublerabbit 4mo ago
    BSD daily driver too. Just recently bought a new NVme so I had to reformat, but went 80+ days without a reboot.
• TacticalCoder 4mo ago
  Nope. When I want to know when was the last time I came back from vacation, I type this at the CLI: uptime I turn off my desktop when I go on vacation for more than a few days. If I just leave for the week-end I don't turn it off. Very rarely there's a published kernel fix leading to an exploit that could potentially affect my setup that requires rebooting, but that is exceedingly rare. FWIW my desktop regularly reaches six months of uptime and I had a server at OVH which I kept just because I could that reached something silly like 3400 days of uptime (it just didn't reach 10 years). At some point (after maybe three years) the uptime was so cool I decided to just keep it and see how long it'd stay up (and, no, that one wasn't secure at all: kids, don't try this at home). When the fire at OVH took entire bays off, I wasn't affected so the thing kept cranking. If we leave security concerns aside, OSes are really that stable now (unless we're talking about Microsoft products of course). > Have You Restarted Your Computer This Week? Now of course I've got something like 12 computers at home so it really depends which computer you're talking about. For example I've got a server with ECC memory that runs VMs and containers but... I only need it when I'm awake. So that one I typically turn off at night (for the energy consumption). I know, I know: desktop up and server down at night I must be doing something wrong right? But then it's my setup and I do what I want.
• kps 4mo ago
  No, restarting is an occasional unfortunate workaround for subsystems that don't properly update in place (e.g. OS kernel).
• kylemaxwell 4mo ago
  I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure. This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least. These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.
  • branon 4mo ago
    I do still enjoy the odd >30 day uptime on my PC. Usually only reboot when a new kernel version is cut. I used to reboot into every kernel patch but often I leave .0 running for a very long time now. They seem stable and the kernel moves fast enough nowadays there's often another .0 right around the corner. There might be exploits but they're not a valid threat model for my little desktop. If something smaller like Mesa updates, I can reload everything simply by logging out/back in, no need for a full reboot/LUKS unlock.
    • jonhohle 4mo ago
      In the mid-2000s I ran a. Fleet of RedHat servers that hosted millions of domains. I had boxes in that fleet that were up for over a year. Netcraft confirmed it! Microsoft literally bought these 6 or 7 servers to migrate to IIS so they could “beat” Apache. It took more than double the servers, but after I did the initial work it was moved to a different team and I don’t know how the uptime compared.
  • mhitza 4mo ago
    It was a differentiator when distro updates where sparser, and in start comparison with Windows at the time which couldn't stay up for more than a couple of days without crashing (particularly the XP era).
  • StableAlkyne 4mo ago
    > These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure It's also just nice to start Monday with a fresh boot. If nothing else, it keeps me from getting to the point of 200 tabs open that I'm totally definitely going to need again "soon"
• ffitch 4mo ago
  A couple of years ago I noticed that my mac starts collecting weird little bugs if I don’t reboot for a really long time. The cursor starts misbehaving (it won’t reliably change over links, or in graphic editors), switching between apps might take a few seconds, and once I had my keyboard input latency increased by ~500-700ms for every keystroke. These issues go away on reboot. I’m trying rebooting once a week or so now.
  • gwbas1c 4mo ago
    Uhm, do you have a virus or other spyware?
    • ffitch 4mo ago
      hope not : ) I observed these across three computers on different versions of macOS.
      • gwbas1c 4mo ago
        I've been using MacOS for 20 years and I haven't encountered it. I rarely reboot. Do you have some unusual hardware that requires a driver, or otherwise install something that requires a driver?
        • ffitch 4mo ago
          No extra hardware, stock macbooks and an imac. No fancy apps either, RayCast is probably the only one that overrides default system behavior. It used to be better, a few years ago macOS would run stable for months, but even then I had to resort to ‘killall Dock’ for occasional glitches.
  • bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
    does logging out fix it?
  • wishfish 4mo ago
    Can confirm. I have similar problems with very long uptimes on my MBA M1. By long, I mean two months or more. The most common recurring problem is the Mac forgetting it's connected to a monitor. But the problems are often very random. I've had most of the ones you described. Though I shouldn't use the word "common" as the occurrences are rare. My guess is 4-6 times a year over the past five years. Would love to know what causes it but the randomness of the symptoms would make investigating a bit difficult.
• JTbane 4mo ago
  There are enough crappy win32 applications that you probably should restart Windows PCs nightly.
  • IAmBroom 4mo ago
    The usual "Windoze suxxor amirite?" reply.
• coldblues 4mo ago
  Anyone who is using full disk encryption will be turning off their computer when they're not around. Hibernation is an option if you want to keep your state.
  • lgeorget 4mo ago
    I was about to comment that exactly. If you computer is never switched off, your encryption is permanently bypassed.
    • bluebarbet 4mo ago
      True but in practice it's still worth something if a screen lock is used. The police won't be foiled but a casual thief is likely to unplug or reboot and at that point your data is protected.
  • charcircuit 4mo ago
    Unless you use iOS which properly handles clearing encryption keys when the device is locked.
• petecooper 4mo ago
  I have a terrible work / non-work balance, and one trivial habit I've established is turning off my (Mac mini & MacBook Air) computers & screens when my work time is done. I don't want it to be trivially easy for me to just do one more thing…there be dragons. My Saturday mornings are more often markers for running Onyx[1] for maintenance. [1] https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html
• jmclnx 4mo ago
  yes, I always do. But today I had to power it off, I accidentally created a fork bomb changing a couple of scripts on OpenBSD. It did not freeze the system but I could not create any more processes. shutdown(8) could not even run, so a hard power off :)
• porridgeraisin 4mo ago
  Every couple of months typically I do an arch linux update and reboot. But that is about it. I do hibernate sometimes though, and that is pretty much the same final state power-wise as doing a shutdown (more so for my laptop as it does not keep keyboard/mouse powered in S4 and its the same with the hall effect sensor for the lid).
• gwbas1c 4mo ago
  Sometimes I shut down my computer at the end of the day to symbolically end my week. That being said, I hibernate at the end of my day. For some reason, merely closing my Dell laptop just isn't as smooth on reopen as my Mac. The startup is almost as long as a full reboot.
• Stealthisbook 4mo ago
  Sadly, my computer has apparently rebooted multiple times this week. I didn't do it, but Microsoft decided it was for the best. I remember when a restart was something you were asked to consent to, and before that you had to affirmatively decide to perform an update.
  • freedomben 4mo ago
    Yes the good 'ol days when the user was considered the owner rather than a security liability. I do miss that philosophy immensely.
• denpa 4mo ago
  My Mac and Linux machine get a reboot every now and then. On the other hand, my work Windows machine, welp…
• krembo 4mo ago
  notice that for some hw parts restart ≠ shutdown & reboot. if you really want to start fresh, shut your machine down once a week.
  • Night_Thastus 4mo ago
    Actually, it's more or less the opposite. In some OS's (Windows, at least) a reboot does additional purging and loss of state that a shutdown will not do. That's by design, so a normal shutdown/startup is fast, but if you're having a problem a reboot will be more thorough.
• memcg 4mo ago
  I helped manage 1500 desktops and thousands of VMs over twelve years in a call center and I preached rebooting at the end of the day/shift. There is no doubt that this reduced ticket volume compared to other sites. This included individual and shared desktops.
• BoppreH 4mo ago
  This is actually useful for smartphones. Sometimes smartphone malware is capable of infecting a device but not persisting, so reboots clean it back up. At least if you trust the NSA's advice: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21018353/nsa-mobile-device-best-practices.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21018353/nsa-mobile-d...
  • arikrahman 4mo ago
    This is one of the features I appreciate with OneUI, I can set it to automatically restart it in the mornings.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
    The people that I know, in the security field, restart their phones, multiple times per day.
  • Rendello 4mo ago
    The same reason I barely restarted my iPhone for a few years. The `checkra1n` jailbreak had to be reinstalled each time (though it was easy): https://checkra.in/ https://checkra.in/
  • Cider9986 4mo ago
    On GrapheneOS, restarting also brings the device to a BFU state, which makes it loads harder for an adversary with physical access to unlock it.
    • throawayonthe 4mo ago
      yep, and this is the case for both major mobile operating systems fun thing is that graphene had the feature to automatically reboot on a timer after inactivity for a while, but now ios also ships it :D
      • Cider9986 4mo ago
        I remember something where on maybe mainstream Androids you'd have to fully turn off in order to turn it into BFU, but maybe it does just by restarting now.
• mkirsten 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Stratoscope 4mo ago
    Because someone submitted it, and people found it interesting and upvoted it. Did you have a different qualification in mind?
• bethekidyouwant 4mo ago
  uptime 13:37:37 up 257 days 21:20, 1 user, load average: 5.19, 5.04, 5.63 I had over a year last time :(
• apparent 4mo ago
  I restarted my Mac the other day and my free disk space went from 4GB to 40GB. Things are also noticeably zippier soon after a restart. Annoyingly, I can't reboot often because I'd lose all my incognito tabs. It's possible that quitting all applications would have the same effect (except the swap space, which seems not to fully release until reboot), but it's just as much hassle to do that as to fully restart the machine.
  • gs17 4mo ago
    If you need "incognito" tabs that last longer, it might be worth looking into something like the Temporary Containers addon for Firefox.
    • apparent 4mo ago
      Appreciate it, will check this out!
• LoganDark 4mo ago
  [dead]
• ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
  Yes. And I'll likely do it again. Not always by choice. I can crash the system by playing a certain game (they still treat the Apple platform like crap). I can also put it into limbo, with Xcode, one of the most bountiful bug farms on Earth.
• dv35z 4mo ago
  I have a cron job which restarts my computer every day (Linux Mint Debian edition). I like waking up to a "fresh" computer, and since I know that it will restart every day - this is a "forcing function" to (1) be diligent about saving things that are important, (2) treating browser tabs, random notes, etc as ephemeral, and bookmarking the important stuff. I used to work at an office where we pair-programmed with clients all day (Pivotal Labs), and most of our computers had some sort of "automatically restart / restore from a known-good image". I liked this, as it resulted in less cruft over time, and some intentionality about what getting a computer into a productive state means. It also got me thinking of using automatic routines to accomplish goals, and not being so attached to my open tabs, etc. Let it gooo.... To be more specific about this - for those wanting to get into blogging/publishing, this could mean auto-opening the website project folder using VSCodium upon user login, so its ready to go for the morning coffee. More half the time I just close it - but as a "default", it makes it easy for me to do the thing I want to do. sudo crontab -e -u root #----------------------------- # RESTART COMPUTER DAILY #----------------------------- 00 04 * * * /usr/sbin/shutdown -r +5 "Rebooting in 5 minutes. Run 'shutdown -c' to cancel"
  • artisinal 4mo ago
    A slightly more fun version: 0 0 * * * sleep $((RANDOM % 86400)) && /usr/sbin/shutdown -r +5 "Rebooting in 5 minutes. Run 'shutdown -c' to cancel"
    • dv35z 4mo ago
      Some would say "Chaotic evil". Some would say "Always be prepared!!"
      • artisinal 4mo ago
        Chaotic evil is my favorite article from The Daily WTF: 12 22 * * * kill 21342
      • kjellsbells 4mo ago
        Some would say, "Oh, Windows Update again"
• grimjeer 4mo ago
  I reboot one of my machines all the time. It's a Mac Mini running 'Little Snitch', which informs me about all of the network connects my apps make, especially browsers. One cool feature of that program is that one can temporarily grant access to a connection, for instance until the request quits, or one logs out, or one restarts a machine. I'm slowly developing permanent allow / ban lists, but I also use this feature to temporarily utilize some website, aand then reboot to avoid cross-contamination. The downside is that I often get shunted off into additional authentication workflows, since the prolonged delay caused by my manual approvals triggers some alerts. One of the entertainment ticket buying services is really convinced I'm committing some kind of fraud. So, in general, I reboot everytime I start using that machine, at least once per day, sometimes more frequently. Fun fact: in a former life, I worked for a retailer with 1000s of remotely deployed machines and no field-based tech support. One of the OSes we used back in the day had a bug that caused their license authorization service to fail after a certain amount of uptime. We had hundreds of machines that reached that uptime, all on the same day. Suffice it to say, that was not fun.
• tamimio 4mo ago
  Rebooting desktops or laptops is ok, rebooting your servers is an anxiety induced task, rebooting your archos linux, well, be prepared to spend an hour troubleshooting afterwards.
  • Night_Thastus 4mo ago
    If the server can't be rebooted without anxiety, something has been configured very poorly.
  • zaik 4mo ago
    I run an XMPP server (Prosody) on Arch Linux since 2020. I upgrade and restart once every week and so far catastrophe has only struck once.
  • zaptheimpaler 4mo ago
    I not only rebooted but upgraded my server from 22.04 to 24.04 and every single package on it this weekend with AI help - took a few hours of talking to the thing, even though the server had accumulated some ugly hacks (like installed KDE on top of Pop OS, had a newer version of glibc than supported) and runs a ton of containers. The AI figured out all the apt and dependency hell bullshit that I would never have gotten through. Its a new world!
    • tamimio 4mo ago
      Well obviously it was a humorous post, or maybe long time ago, my current proxmox servers never had issues in updates, upgrades, migrations, and obviously restarts. Maybe better try proxmox and have vms for your hacks, so next time you can migrate them easily, restore them, or even share them.
• steveBK123 4mo ago
  Anecdotally was discussing with friend circle recently how our Macs have "you must restart now" updates far more often than 1/2/5 years ago. Not sure how much is that quality of dev went down vs quantity of threats went up.
  • adamwk 4mo ago
    Is it really different from that short time ago? It feels like this has been the normal for much longer than 5 years. I do remember there being fewer restarts to update, but I feel like that was way back in the snow leopard days. As to why, I assumed it’s because security fixes are in basically every update these days. And it’s easier to change core systems with a restart than live
• Brendinooo 4mo ago
  uptime: `up 35 days` it feels bad in some sense but I don't like my environment being interrupted!
• Night_Thastus 4mo ago
  I shut my desktop down every night and bring it back up in the morning. It only takes all of 2 seconds these days with NVME drives, even with Fast Boot disabled. It's kind of a power hog and generates a lot of heat, so I try not to run it if I won't be around. Shut down != reboot, but you get the idea.
  • tmtvl 4mo ago
    I also shut my PC down every evening and boot it up in the morning. Suspend to RAM draws too much power for my tastes and suspend to disk does too much writing to the NVME and I don't want to have to buy a new one before the AI death spiral ends in 2028.
• laserDinosaur 4mo ago
  I remember a big debate "back in the day" about the effects of shutting down your PC at night and the effect on the health of the CPU. The theory at the time was that by shutting down your PC every night, the temperature fluctuations would put more stress on the CPU, shorting its life span. However, the other side said that leaving on your PC all day and night would spend more time running and reduce its life span, so only having it running when you needed it was better. I think a website did a test and found it makes no difference, but I remember it being a big topic around the 2000's (it might have been related to AMD chips at the time running extremely hot)
  • Terr_ 4mo ago
    In my recollection, the tale was not temperature changes on startup, but the various electrical issues of getting things moving from standstill. Either way, I just always used sleep-mode.
  • trynumber9 4mo ago
    AMD's first Athlon chips did not run particularily hot. They needed a fan, just like Williamette chips, but actually used less power than the competition. The difference was they had no internal, on-chip diode. If the heatsink and fan fell off, then the chip could cook itself. The boards had a thermal sensor to initiate shutdown if the fan stopped working. But it's debateable if it would detect it quickly enough if the entire cooler fell off. In that scenario, shutting it off seems better. But it might roast itself on start up anyway.
• thealish 4mo ago
  0:43 up 204 days I need to reboot
• yerik 4mo ago
  I used to leave my computer running 24/7, but then I got another computer to make a server, and it really improved my routine to have a "Shutdown and I'm done with computers for today"
• SirMaster 4mo ago
  Is it weird that we don't have a way to update the system without rebooting by this day and age? I think there are things in Linux like live kernel patching (kexec, ksplice), but why by 2026 is this sort of architecture of live system updates not a common or included feature yet? People hate updates and having to reboot and have downtime right? Security updates to core systems are more important than ever now too. So why hasn't this problem been tackled I wonder? Wouldn't it be great if our systems could update without us having to reboot and interrupt our workloads?
  • novafunc 4mo ago
    Many modern Linux distros encourage restarting too. Atomic distros make restarting to boot into a new image the default, though some have flags to do a "live" update too. You still have to reboot for things like kernel updates. As far as I'm aware, live patching the kernel is just for security issues.
  • ivanjermakov 4mo ago
    Not only that, my Arch laptop is not even able to continue functioning after full system update without reboot. It unloads nvidia kernel modules crashing newly opened graphical programs.
    • MawKKe 4mo ago
      This might be nvidia driver thing, I've had similar soft-bricking happen on ubuntu as well
  • protocolture 4mo ago
    Windows does more of this than people notice actually. I was on a system the other day, Server 2016, it had downloaded 2 updates, both system file related, one had installed already and the other one was nagging for a reboot. Stuff like Windows Defender doesnt even really ask if you want to install the update anymore, it just installs the new virus definitions immediately.
    • 4mo ago
• n4r9 4mo ago
  At the end of every workday I shut all the windows and shut down my laptop. Unless I'm in a rush. It's soothing!
• frantzmiccoli 4mo ago
  I delayed upgraded to Tahoe, now I need to restart about every week or so, or I will get random lag and freezes. I also need to restart my iPhone or my airpods will refuse to connect. I preferred the days where I would restart after 6 months, just because it felt right.
• Bo0kerDeWitt 4mo ago
  My employer frequently reminds us to shut down when we're done for the day. Otherwise a thief will have a laptop with the BitLocker already bypassed.
  • thorin 4mo ago
    Tell him you'll make sure to turn it off at exactly 5pm (or whenever you're supposed to finish). And that you'll turn it on at 9am and can't join any meetings till it's started.
• SyzygyRhythm 4mo ago
  No. And in fact it annoys me greatly that our work IT department forces a reboot once a month. My desktop is like an actual desktop. I have my tools laid out exactly how I want them for the task I'm working on. I want to come back to them in exactly the same place when I pause for the night or weekend. I have to clean it up occasionally, to close out things that I'm no longer working on or forgot about. But I'd rather do that incrementally than all at once. Forcing a reboot is like tipping over a physical workbench with a bunch of tools and in-progress projects on it. Just awful, and often takes hours to set back to its original position (at least browser tabs restore reliably these days).
  • erelong 4mo ago
    sounds like some software projects to work on, being able to reboot back to like exactly where you left off (I've been trying to figure this out more for my own computer)
  • zamadatix 4mo ago
    This whole time I thought IT keeps sending out those emails about rebooting for updates because people just couldn't be bothered to remember otherwise. Turns out some remember very well, they just don't care!
• livingsoft 4mo ago
  I'm with the UNIX old timers on this one; cleanliness is overrated. Life is messy, creation is messy. More uptime means more mess. Uptime is longevity; there are few things more valuable in life than longevity.
  • sgt 4mo ago
    Agreed. I put stuff in ~/tmp only to create ~/tmp2 for even more temporary stuff that I don't delete, and so on. I clean up Desktop though as it is in my face.
    • ssl-3 4mo ago
      Mine grow like this: /tmp, /tmp/t, /tmp/tt, /tmp/ttt, [...] Every now and then I might take the time to sweep through and nuke them all, but that might take months or years.
    • neoCrimeLabs 4mo ago
      You reminded me of this story. Windows, not *nix, though. Years ago my cube-mate was called to support a desktop user who has having problems with their machine that couldn't be fixed remotely. He realized the user's HDD was full, so the first thing he did was clear the user's trash bin. Mysteriously the machine came up with a ton of free space. The user seemed happy their machine was up. Nor long after, the help-desk called my cube-mate asking what they did to the user's machine; The user couldn't find any of their files that they had organized in the trash bin.
  • seizethecheese 4mo ago
    I agree with the synthesis of what you said and the OP. Let mess grow then prune. Workspace as a garden.
• byte_0 4mo ago
  I boot my computer every time I will use it and shut it down when I am done. No matter whether on Linux, Windows, or Mac. It's a mindset thing: I will sit at the computer, do what I have to do and then shut it down. Just sharing my way of using it.
• zamadatix 4mo ago
  I shut down every night and power on every morning. The servers with ECC are an exception, I usually keep those on a typical 1 month cycle for all the updates to apply. It's so damn fast these days I active the "Start Day" home automation scene while rolling out of bed and by the time I've reached the computer it's already sitting at the desktop.
• anon291 4mo ago
  I use NixOS and haven't restarted my machines in years. Always on. There are power outages once in a while but everything is set to restart when power is available so it comes back up.
  • _kb 4mo ago
    IMO the power of NixOS is at the other extreme. Set it up with Impermanence (https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Impermanence https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Impermanence) and reboot often. Also worth flagging if you are only ever switching in new configs Kernel patches, firmware, or updates to systemd won’t apply until next boot.
    • anon291 4mo ago
      I usually kexec into new kernels, but rarely, I do reboot for firmware updates. My system is rebooted sometimes due to power, and while it comes back just fine... there's no need to reboot a computer that works.
• simonw 4mo ago
  [dead]
• fferen 4mo ago
  Corporate windows laptop; need to restart every 2-3 days at best.
  • Marsymars 4mo ago
    Thankfully I’ve got admin access on my corporate laptop so disabled this nonsense.
• snailmailman 4mo ago
  I shut down my desktop every night. No reason to keep it on. I can save my work, all my tabs persist, it’s fine. My main complaint is that my PC seems to have crazy clock drift? And windows just doesn’t seem to care? It doesn’t actually cause problems but I will check and see that it’s off by >5 seconds and that just shouldn’t ever happen. My phone is always accurate to <0.05s and same in Linux. Idk why windows isn’t.
  • fsckboy 4mo ago
    >No reason to keep it on. any reason not to simply let it sleep?
    • foobarchu 4mo ago
      Not OP, but the sleep and hibernate states on my desktop are pretty finicky and can't truly be trusted. I'd rather know everything shut down properly than risk it, especially since the thing boots in seconds anyway, and I have to input the encryption password anyway.
      • snailmailman 4mo ago
        Yeah, i just simply don't trust the sleep functionality to not be buggy. I walk away with processes running a decent amount of the time and its unclear to me what things can prevent sleep from triggering and what cant. If i do need to have something persist overnight I use hibernate. And I haven't encountered issues with that. But ive had enough issues with sleep states on my laptops that i just dont bother on my desktop. The monitor goes to sleep if i walk away but the PC doesn't sleep.
      • KennyBlanken 4mo ago
        > sleep and hibernate states on my desktop are pretty finicky That is not normal... Also, if you're on Windows, unless you disabled Fast Boot, you're not actually shutting it down. It's logging you out and suspending to disk.
        • 4mo ago
• TMWNN 4mo ago
  Yes, but only because of a MacOS update. My UnRAID server has been up for more than a month, and would be much longer were it not for a system update there, too. The uptime of the VMs on the server are also affected by this.
• bluebarbet 4mo ago
  Only when the OS security update requires it. Maybe once every couple of weeks on Ubuntu.
• kevinrineer 4mo ago
  I too like running the same kernel for months on end. Just kidding, I restart periodically, especially when there's a kernel patch. To those who worship uptime, how many kmods do you have loaded? Must be nice not subscribing to openwall/NVD/CISA/cve.org
  • OJFord 4mo ago
    I update the kernel frequently. I reboot when I'm sufficiently annoyed by not being able to use USB devices.
• nickjj 4mo ago
  I've been keeping my desktop machines running 24/7 for ~25 years. I only reboot when necessary. I remember having around 280 days of uptime on Windows 7 when it went end of life. Having a UPS helps a lot to protect against short power outages or blips. Nowadays I run Arch Linux, it's been 12 days since a reboot. Not trying to break records, I reboot to apply kernel updates when it's convenient. Since I use tmux and have terminal heavy workflows it takes 1 command and a few seconds to resurrect all of my sessions to get back to where I was at before.
  • chimpanzee2 4mo ago
    > 24/7 for ~25 years r u ok?
    • cindyllm 4mo ago
      [dead]
    • nickjj 4mo ago
      Yes, so are the hardware components. Current machine has been running since 2014. SMART stats on the SSD shows 100,586 powered on hours which is 4,191 days.
      • chimpanzee2 4mo ago
        Have you also measured TBW on your SSD?
        • nickjj 4mo ago
          SMART stats shows it's at 54% health remaining, all tests passed without errors. The drive might be too old to report back TBW. It's a Crucial 256 GB SATA 3.1 SSD. It has LBAs written which is 138292009426. The sector size is 512 bytes. I think you can calculate TBW from that? (138292009426 * 512) / 1000000000000 = ~70.8 TB written?
          • 4mo ago
• Krssst 4mo ago
  > Maybe I’m a bit weird, but I like seeing all these warnings: “You have unsaved work! Are you sure?” One of the reasons I don't like to reboot: Windows taking a few seconds to show the warning, so I have to either babysit the computer until it shuts down or come back the next day with an unrebooted computer. Now I just use shutdown /f to force shutdown/reboot and forget about it.
• avador 4mo ago
  Once I began the “start from zero” routine at work, I could not stop. It meant I had to know what to do to get back to my ideal dev env every morning. It meant I had the choice to automate that, or to leave some bits (or all bits) manual. It surprised me how much I preferred manual, and taught me to recognize when things were actually tedious vs premature shortcuts. Clarity trumps convenience, but, you know, not always.
• himata4113 4mo ago
  23:58:27 up 716 days, 16:44, 1 user, load average: 9.06, 6.93, 6.40 I guess not. However, this is sort of dishonest since I do sometimes do execute kill -1 or reload individual kernel modules.
• h4kunamata 4mo ago
  My Lenovo Legion gaming laptop running Linux Mint Cinnamon takes ~10s to boot. I hardly ever leave it on, I mean why?? It is silly to use a cron job to do something that only takes 2s for a human to do. My homelab Debian Netinst servers tho, run non-stop for months or even years without reboot. Half century ago Linux had a bug where servers had to be rebooted after X hours, that is no longer an issue. Windows however requires a reboot because its pagination memory gets full and the longer you run it, the more the performance goes to shit.
  • tolciho 4mo ago
    Months to years without a reboot sounds like a pretty big gamble as to whether the hardware still boots, or not. More frequent reboots tend to catch "the hardware has soured" (and how would you know?) issues sooner, like maybe the BIOS decides to come up with the clock set four years into the future and then time sync can fail and then everything fails. The prior example was strictly hypothetical, of course no real system would ever do that.
    • GoblinSlayer 4mo ago
      My old notebook periodically failed to boot, so I kept it running to not see it fail to boot.
  • sbstp 4mo ago
    Don't you reboot servers to get kernel security updates? I usually have unattended upgrades with the option to reboot during the night if necessary
• senectus1 4mo ago
  08:15:42 up 14 days, 14:27 Thats actually a long time for me... I'm using Fedora and they ship a lot of updates fairly frequently... and I tend to get twitchy about updates...
• zaptheimpaler 4mo ago
  Windows is leading the pack here as usual. They've introduced a new "all your RAM are belong to us" feature where all 48GB of my RAM slowly drips into a black hole over time, ne'er to be released again until reboot.
• zelphirkalt 4mo ago
  I don't feel like keeping my tower pc running more than necessary. When I don't use it for hours, I usually turn it off. At least when I go to bed I turn it off. Next day I turn it on again. Like a normal person. I don't see a need to save 1 minute or so, by keeping it running.
  • Zecc 4mo ago
    Same here. But I hibernate it, which defeats the purpose.
    • 14 4mo ago
      Even with the increase in bloat on windows once I moved to an SSD the boot time went down to like 20 seconds. Never felt the need to do anything other than shut down if I was going to be away for more than a few minutes.
      • GoblinSlayer 4mo ago
        Windows doesn't shut down by default.
  • iqfareez 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • bcraven 4mo ago
    I'm astonished I had to wade through so many other replies to find this one. I had never considered I might be doing things abnormally when I turned my machine off at the end of the day. If nothing else, think of the power usage!
  • noir_lord 4mo ago
    Same plus I dual boot. It's less than 20 seconds to a usable desktop even on windows, some optimizations aren't worth the hassle.
• Jeremy1026 4mo ago
  Just got back from vacation, so actually yes. But my uptimes usually hit about 150 days before I get around to running OS updates forcing a restart.
• midtake 4mo ago
  Desktop for gaming and Macbook get shut down when I'm not using them, the Mac Minis stay on.
• supertroop 4mo ago
  I’ve been on macOS since 2012 and only have to restart during Os updates. What is this person on about? Slow news day? Clickbait? I was clearly baited.
• mvdtnz 4mo ago
  I turn off my work Mac on the weekends because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make it shut the fuck up. If I close the lid I still hear email, calendar and slack notifications. If I explicitly put it to sleep I still hear notifications. The only way I can walk away from that cursed computer knowing I won't hear it nag me from the next room is to shut it down.
• calebm 4mo ago
  (env-godsart) kernel_2026 git:(main) uptime 0:44 up 445 days, 10:50, 18 users, load averages: 5.03 4.35 3.73
• vntok 4mo ago
  I'm running QubesOS, my various qubes reboot about a dozen times a day.
• rf15 4mo ago
  One of our customers has a daily automated restart for their servers. This is because the IT people have long lost track of what the system actually does, and feel they have no time to figure it out. It is the bane of my existence when it comes to the predictability of uptime, not to mention long-term processes getting interrupted over the day boundary.
  • KennyBlanken 4mo ago
    https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/firing-the-right-customers-is-good-business/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/firing-the-right-custome... ...among many others. If you're too dependent upon them that you can't, that's a whole other problem, one that needs to be fixed anyway.
• scrame 4mo ago
  Yeah, several times. Thanks windows.
• paolfs 4mo ago
  When you use disk encryption for security reasons it seems to me you need to turn off your computer after your done.
  • jorisw 4mo ago
    Logging the user out would achieve the same no?
    • paolfs 4mo ago
      No. Unlocking of the disk happens at boot time. Logging out will keep your disk unlocked. Hybernate will also lock your disk. Edit: it might depend on your hardware. The latest Macs are more secure while sleeping / logged out.
      • jorisw 4mo ago
        I've always assumed that (a derivative of) the user's password decrypts their section of the filesystem.
• gorgoiler 4mo ago
  Have you ever lost a laptop, through theft or coffee spill or mainboard failure or just accidentally wiping something? I have three machines now: two laptops that syncthing to a mini pc that sends snapshots offsite. Losing access to one laptop is no longer a day-ending, world-stopping event! As such, the safest ground state for any machine is to be sync’d then powered off. I do it after every “session”: before lunch, at the end of the day, and often in between if I’m at home and just using the machine for 45 minutes to e.g. buy a mattress before going back to the garden. Similarly, with my work machine, I push everything to the central repository at the end of every day and delete all my local branches. They are more prudent with spending so I don’t have a hot-spare second machine like I do at home. The next best thing is to be prepped for catastrophic data loss at all times. I often think about why I only have one phone. Losing that would suck but it’s harder because it’s iOS and I’m less knowledgable about how to automate it as a cattle phone, not a pet phone.
• zombot 4mo ago
  macOS Sonoma is so unstable (on x64 anyway), just leaving it running without doing anything will mess it up eventually, so restarts force themselves in a way. My Linux laptop at least has system updates as the reason for restarts.
• gloosx 4mo ago
  My Macbook needs a restart periodically. Somehow my quite limited disk space (500GB) is getting lower and lower and lower to the point where spotlight will stop working. After restart, I magically get 50GB of disk space back, I'm not sure what is wrong with it and I never took the time to investigate, but I guess it's caches and temp files of all kinds. I also HATE the invention of "open all apps and windows back so everything is the same as before restart", no matter if I choose no in the special dialog, it freaking opens the apps and windows which were open prior to restart, which is FRUSTRATING, I have to kill them all as soon as they pop up, pressing CMD+Q repeatedly for a solid minute after EVERY restart – I like my system clean and pristine after I shut it down and up again, but somehow they made it problematic.
  • vintagedave 4mo ago
    Yes! Same here! And the same disk space issue. I remember switching to Mac OS from Windows. That was back in the days where you had to restart Windows, and Windows apps could steal focus. Mac OS X: rarely restarted, soon moving for a good decade to never; and apps could not steal focus, the Dock icon bounced. Where are we today? I reboot macOS regularly, deal with the same frustrating issues on login, and when I type sometimes a dialog or app steals my keystrokes. That includes permissions dialogs, 'Foo wants to access your Documents folder'. I do not know every app I have granted permissions to, because I do know that I was typing in a text field and the dialog appeared as I was doing it. I feel there's a loss there of valuing: * Uptime, or rather, lack of interruption and losing state, as a value for users * Control: the user is using an app, respect that and don't allow other apps to disrespect and take control away from it, again as value or attitude towards users. The worst part about the apps restarting is not that they do it, though today it feels a hack to mostly-not-quite restore state that shouldn't have been lost in the first place. It's how long it takes. I have an Apple Silicon Mac. It can take over a minute for apps to restore, Spaces to switch as they re-maximise, etc. And forget trying to interact during that time: if you want to quit an app (say) it's risky because any other app can steal focus and you find yourself in another app while trying to deal with the first. And Spaces restoration? I have a permanent black Space. It belongs to Parallels, which is actually on another space. And I have one Space with multiple windows: they belong to Fork, and each one should be in its own Space, but they overlap like a mini windowing system. The bugs. I realise I sound like I'm complaining, but... I am. I paid money for this and I know how good it used to be. I've been seriously looking at Linux and maybe KDE Plasma recently. There's little barrier to switching, not when you actively annoy your users and push them. I did it once (to Mac), and I've been thinking, well, I can do it again.
• Havoc 4mo ago
  Yeah on windows yesterday to fix a broken outlook. Some things never change
• 50208 4mo ago
  I shutdown / reboot ... this is blogpost and HN worthy?
• thisisnotwifi 4mo ago
  Had to restart because of https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1sghrd2/we_found_a_ticking_time_bomb_in_macos_tcp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1sghrd2/we_found_a_t...
• eimrine 4mo ago
  I have restarted my main PC twice for this year. Because when the RAM is over and OOM starts to kill anything then the system might become unpredictable.
• throw-nodox-23 4mo ago
  I.. I cannot restart my computer. Why? I work at a smallish agency as a developer. A few years ago we were acquired by a massive global corporation as part of the typical vertical integration strategy these big boys usually run with. Anyway, that’s all dandy as we otherwise would have perished during Covid. But this parent company, as many others, have some rather stringent security policies when it comes to IT. They use ZScaler for ”securing” traffic to- and from its employees’ computers. And wow has this been a boiled frog. At first it was fine, not that big of a deal as not much of our day-to-day tooling was blocked. But slowly and steadily the frog got cooked. Now the frog is basically dead. Like.. dead dead. For example their current configuration of the ZScaler proxy strips ALPN causing all traffic to fallback to HTTP/1.1 which has - well, quite some consequences for web development. There are a gazillion more things - but to really get to the point, no I haven’t restarted my computer in the last euhmm weeks. We found a way to disable ZScaler temporarily to access the ”real” internet, but this loophole has been plugged in their latest rollout. And if I restart my computer the new version will take effect - which will literally make it impossible for me to work. And yes, we have for a long time been trying to explain/escalate this but the red tape and bureaucracy of a massive org like this (where a vast majority doesn’t even know we exist) makes it feel very Sisyphus-esque.
  • one33seven 4mo ago
    This is your bosses problem. Apply security patches and reboot. Find a book to read.
    • GTP 4mo ago
      Put like this, could sound like malicious compliance. But, if you disable whatever security product your company mandates on your company laptop and then you somehow get a malware, they will point the finger at you. Saying "I wouldn't have been able to work otherwise" will probably not work. Reboot your company laptop, let it install any patches it likes to, then complain to your manager. It is their resposibility to figure this out. If you work around this, you risk getting in trouble.
      • 4mo ago
• dominicrose 4mo ago
  Does turning a laptop off to carry it and starting it on afterwards count? It's a poor reason to turn off a computer but hey it's a reason.
• realty_geek 4mo ago
  From the post I learnt about: https://github.com/tw93/mole https://github.com/tw93/mole. (Clean, uninstall, analyze, optimize, and monitor your Mac from the terminal.) How have I not heard of this before?
  • Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
    > How have I not heard of this before? Probably because it's only 9 months old, developed by a Chinese developer (from what I can gather), and vibe coded. The developer has plenty of prior pre-AI experience though.
• MathMonkeyMan 4mo ago
  I shut my computers all the way down when I'm done with them. I like a clean slate when I return.
• Cool_Caribou 4mo ago
  I've been forced to restart my computer when it crashed 3 months ago, otherwise, no, never, complete waste of time.
• GTP 4mo ago
  I'm used to turning off my laptop at the end of the day. I can hibernate it if I'm working on something and I don't want to close the applications, but if I'm done, what's the point? Same for using standby. I would save some seconds at boot, but my laptop's boot time is fast anyway.
• deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
• mikhailfranco 4mo ago
  Windows 11 seems to feign forgetting your PIN password to force a restart.
• Jeff9James 4mo ago
  I WON'T Restart my computer. Why? I got this android app called twent.xyz and im addicted to it. I can do almost everything about laptop was meant to do, but on my phone. Linux Terminal, Agent CLIs, UI automation, Bots, subagents, GIT, Filesystem, etc. Its like a Super AGENTIC android app. Oh, and great things dont come at a cost. Its free. twent.xyz
• b3lvedere 4mo ago
  All my windows computers are shutdown when not needed. My Debian 13 mini 'server' is on 24/7, conserves energy as much as possible (like CPU C8 state), but reboots nightly when required by patches and updates. My NAS only really on when absolutely necessary, but can be activated using wake-on-lan. So yes, i restart things quite frequently :)
• warpech 4mo ago
  I have a recurring daily task of closing all browser tabs and a weekly task of rebooting my Mac. Tracking this as a task helps my digital hygiene, and at the same prevents me from doing it more often than needed.
• mhalikosen 4mo ago
  I restart my Mac every morning.
• vermaden 4mo ago
  Nope. frankenpad25 vermaden ~ % uname -prism FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE-p6 amd64 amd64 GENERIC frankenpad25 vermaden ~ % uptime --libxo=json | jless | jq { "uptime-information": { "time-of-day": "12:50PM", "uptime": 790654, "days": 9, "hours": 3, "minutes": 37, "seconds": 34, "uptime-human": "9 days, 3:38", "users": 15, "load-average-1": 2.72, "load-average-5": 2.54, "load-average-15": 2.00 } }
• SubRadar 4mo ago
  [flagged]
• sylware 4mo ago
  1 - near my bed, have to stop it to sleep 2 - updating the kernel and drivers "often", have to restart it.
• chimpanzee2 4mo ago
  thats the ideal tbh. no persistent state, except in your mind and soul. everything else is transient. meditate on this.
• bArray 4mo ago
  I only shutdown when absolutely necessary, i.e. the system becomes unstable and crashes. Otherwise all of my machines have 100% uptime. This is for a few reasons: 1. Some tools take time to get setup in the way that they were originally setup. I mentally want everything to remain where I left it. I'm usually working on 5+ projects at a time, it's already enough mental tax to have to context switch, let alone to have to go find all the resources I need to be productive again. 2. I'm forced to use Ubuntu, and it is constantly updating stuff and making it crash. Every time I reboot it's a gamble as to whether something I previously used works again properly. Maybe 1 in 100 boots, the entire system doesn't come back properly.
• xeonax 4mo ago
  My work machine (windows) has an uptime of 18 days. But I hibernate it daily. Hibernate in windows os is wonderful thing. Sadly Apple doesn't have something similar. My apple machine (Mac Studio) shuts down everyday. Since it doesn't have hibernation feature.
  • wpm 4mo ago
    You might want to take a look at the output of `man pmset` in a Terminal. macOS absolutely has hibernate, it just isn't exposed in the GUI.
• butlike 4mo ago
  To be honest, I just find it annoying I have to 2FA sign into JIRA and everything else if I restart, so I don't.
  • zamadatix 4mo ago
    IT departments which mandate MFA on everything but don't bother offering a hardware security key option so it isn't hell deserve to log in and out of all their apps 10,000 times.
• pjmlp 4mo ago
  Every single day.
• fduran 4mo ago
  With servers, if they have a huge uptime and sysadmins etc are afraid to restart them, then they have "pets" with high liability, requiring Infra as Code https://docs.sadservers.com/blog/destroy-and-deploy-the-joys-of-immutability/ https://docs.sadservers.com/blog/destroy-and-deploy-the-joys...
• jtr121 4mo ago
  Who are you surprisetalk, and what have you done to my poor little rant???
  • surprisetalk 4mo ago
    :-)