alt Hacker NewsHave You Restarted Your Computer This Week?
Comments
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.
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?
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-d...
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!
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)
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.
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"
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, restarting is an occasional unfortunate workaround for subsystems that don't properly update in place (e.g. OS kernel).
0:43 up 204 days
I need to reboot
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).
uptime: `up 35 days`
it feels bad in some sense but I don't like my environment being interrupted!
My Mac and Linux machine get a reboot every now and then. On the other hand, my work Windows machine, welp…
There are enough crappy win32 applications that you probably should restart Windows PCs nightly.
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.
Yes, a few times. Thank you for asking, I hope you restart your computer some as well. :)
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
uptime
13:37:37 up 257 days 21:20, 1 user, load average: 5.19, 5.04, 5.63
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
notice that for some hw parts restart ≠ shutdown & reboot. if you really want to start fresh, shut your machine down once a week.
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 :)
‘“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.)
Nope. When I want to know when was the last time I came back from vacation, I type this at the CLI:
uptime
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.
[dead]
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.