Have you restarted your computer this week?

https://taonaw.com/2026/06/27/have-you-restarted-your-computer.html

by surprisetalk • 22 days ago

223 399 22 days ago

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mrhottakes• 22 days ago

Yes, a few times. Thank you for asking, I hope you restart your computer some as well. :)

roli64• 22 days ago

No I power it off first and then I start it up again

iamtedd• 22 days ago

For Windows, this may not be enough: https://m.majorgeeks.com/content/page/the_truth_about_window...

zetanor• 22 days ago

Indeed, power off and power on sometimes doesn't even reset uptime.

IAmBroom2• 22 days 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.

gonzalohm5• 22 days 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)

vidarh3• 22 days 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.

gonzalohm5• 22 days 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

AlienRobot• 22 days ago

Keeping a PC running when you aren't doing anything with it sounds like a waste of electricity to me.

Electricity also wears down electronic components, so I think it also shortens the lifespan of your PC parts.

weego• 22 days ago

my every day use macbook I expect 150+ days uptime before something goes wonky that forces a reboot

elAhmo• 22 days ago

I used to be in this camp, maybe not 150+ days but with month+ uptimes, but now with Docker I have to restart regularly as I frequently get notes about 'no more disk space' and the only way to reclaim is is to reboot.

arthurofbabylon• 22 days ago

I think your model of open/closed is incomplete and thus misleading. There are more states to a process than "active" and "inactive," and it is not optimal for the system to simply move processes between those two gross states. The obvious example is non-foreground apps during multitasking. A less obvious example is an app during a background refresh.

"Fully closing" a process is not necessarily cleaner than letting the system allocate intelligently, despite what one's puritanical upbringing might make them believe. (Consider how artists often need a messy space to optimally hold their processes.)

gonzalohm5• 22 days ago

I think my point is that minimizing the process doesn't free the ram it's using. Closing it, even if it stays running in the background, should free up resources

kps2• 22 days ago

I believe this is because of how Mac is designed

Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.

gonzalohm5• 22 days ago

What's the point of sleeping your computer? If you are not using it then it's better to just turn it off

kibwen2• 22 days ago

I still remember reaching into my backpack to retrieve my Macbook in sleep mode only to find it hot to the touch, having woken up for some goddamn stupid reason. We had "proper" sleep decades ago: we called it "hibernate". Modern "smart sleep" is a technological regression, and Apple is as big an offender as any.

dminik2• 22 days ago

I think a large part is also how long it takes to restart a Mac. Every so often a coworker has to restart and I could probably restart my Linux (or even Windows) laptop 3 times before they're back on.

Kind of reminds me of how slow Windows computers used to boot back in the Vista and 7 era.

jonhohle2• 22 days ago

What’s crazy is that boot time was a headline feature of Snow Leopard.

swiftcoder3• 22 days ago

Wat? The apple silicon one on my desk restarts in under 30 seconds. Markedly faster than the Windows PC next to it

maccard2• 22 days ago

I'd argue the opposite. My mac wakes up from sleep when I open the lid, and is functional in seconds with the fingerprint. Meanwhile sleep on windows is a complete dumpster truck and can result in any of "works fine", "a bunch of apps have got stuck" or "your battery drained in your backpack".

Also, my Win11 desktop is "fast" to get from POST (which takes > 2 minutes to do RAM check on every boot with 192GB RAM) to the login screen, but it's a good few minutes from log in before windows has started all the background stuff and it's actually functional.

KennyBlanken4• 22 days ago

Are they MDM'd? If so that's the MDM's fault, not the OS.

dwb4• 22 days ago

That is not true, when you close apps on macOS the process(es) really are finished, just like on Windows or Linux.

LoganDark3• 22 days ago

I think they think of "closing an app" as closing its windows, which on Mac does not always "Quit" the app.

LoganDark3• 22 days ago

I think what you're talking about is how on Mac, an application can stay running without having any windows. Separate from closing all the windows, you usually have to "Quit" the application if you really want it gone. This is useful for a couple reasons:

- You can "Quit" the application without closing all the windows, and then the next time you start the application, your windows can come back.

- You can close all the windows without "Quit"ting the application, and you don't have to wait for the application to load again in order to open a window later.

Additionally, since application lifecycle is managed separately from the open windows, apps can do cool things like saving and restoring the set of open windows through a system restart. Which Windows and Linux still haven't managed. (Maybe Windows can try to restart the processes... I think I saw that becoming an option more recently)

I've never rebooted often in general, even when I daily-drove Windows. Then, it was because it was annoying to get my preferred workspace back after a Windows restart. Now, I daily-drive macOS and I don't often reboot until the machine gets slow/janky because the machine doesn't really need a reboot until then. And I don't hate reboots as much as I would for Windows because macOS is a lot better at session restoration

trashface• 22 days ago

On linux a lot of the time you kinda have to shut down because it either won't go to sleep ("failed to freeze" some process or another) or it will hang or lock up during/after wake - especially if it has nvidia with its binary blobs, but i've had problems with (in kernel, open source) network card drivers too. Since I first had problems like this with linux 2 decades ago, it seems like they will never be able to figure it out.

Some of this seems to be getting worse with the move to wayland. There is no design concept like windows D3D device reset or lost device, or display timeout/recovery, so drivers are apparently charged with perfectly remembering all the state that compositors create, through all the sleep states, with predictably bad results.

graemep3• 22 days ago

I have only ever had one sleep over multiple Linux laptops over nearly 20 years, my own and other people's, including some tricky hardware (an MS surface). I only ever use sleep/suspend to RAM though. I avoid Nvidia though.

fortran77• 22 days ago

I never shut off my Windows laptop. Just close it. Once a month or so when there's a major update it gets rebooted.

jay_kyburz2• 22 days ago

My 15 year old kid annoys me because he will do a full shut down just to go eat his dinner. I'm like "just let it sleep" and he's like "No!"

graemep3• 22 days ago

Linux users do not clean up AFAIK, and the article is by a Mac user who does clean up. Why would Linux and Windows users not use sleep? AFAIK everyone does.

SchemaLoad2• 22 days ago

I avoid sleep on my desktop because it often wakes up in a weird broken state, particularly with audio glitching. I avoid sleep on my Steamdeck because the battery slowly drains in sleep.

On my Macbook I always use sleep since there are no downsides.

jillesvangurp• 22 days ago

I reboot every few months. Usually because of an update. Very occasionally because something gets a bit buggy. Mostly I just close my laptop or lock the screen when I walk away. It's not worth my time rebooting and then having to reopen stuff to get back to where I was a few minutes ago. Doesn't get me anything I need.

mikestew• 22 days 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• 22 days 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-...>

0xEnsp1re• 22 days 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.

spogbiper2• 22 days 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.

felix-the-cat• 22 days 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.

ck22• 22 days 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

1970-01-012• 22 days 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.

ck22• 22 days ago

that's an interesting thought but would violate physics for lightning to come in through the ground line?

fragmede2• 22 days ago

Lightning is a special case because it will jump through the air, regardless of the surge switch status.

maccard2• 22 days ago

I have a home office with a desktop workstation. I shut down at EOD. When I worked in an office we were instructed by IT to leave the machines running overnight and they would run their scans and nonsense outside working hours, which was neat.

MisterTea• 22 days ago

I do the same. I am not a fan of laptops preferring instead to sit down at a desktop to work. When I'm done I exit all my programs and shut down. I don't understand people who drag their computer state around everywhere.

dinkleberg• 22 days ago

I guess I'm old-school then too. I `shutdown now` once I'm done for the day. It takes all of a few seconds to start back up. I see literally no value in keeping it on overnight.

Then again, I primarily use a desktop, so that probably factors in.

Icarusfoundyou• 22 days ago

Yes, i shutdown my pc every day. Maybe it's a habit from old times when i was living with my family and we really had to count every cent.

The only thing that usually runs all the time is my mini-pc, which i use as a server but due to the ongoing heat (and me not using it much at the moment), i've shut that down as well.

assimpleaspossi• 22 days 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).

doublerabbit3• 22 days ago

BSD daily driver too.

Just recently bought a new NVme so I had to reformat, but went 80+ days without a reboot.

TacticalCoder• 22 days 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.

kps2• 22 days ago

No, restarting is an occasional unfortunate workaround for subsystems that don't properly update in place (e.g. OS kernel).

kylemaxwell2• 22 days 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• 22 days 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.

jonhohle2• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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"

PaulDavisThe1st3• 22 days ago

200 tabs? The children of summer are still among us, it seems (he says, glancing at the current tab count of slightly over 1800).

globular-toast• 22 days ago

Ahem... yeah... "were"...

I do actually reboot occasionally these days, because the world is so serious now.

marcosdumay• 22 days ago

As a rule, if you don't reboot your servers while you are near them watching for problems, they will reboot by themselves at 3am in the first day you get sick or are traveling.

goodcanadian• 22 days ago

My machine was rebooted this week due to a power outage. I don't recall the last time prior to that. It generally goes weeks if not months without a reboot.

mattmatheus• 22 days ago

I've followed the same routine each Friday for at least the past 10 years.

- Install all updates

- Save tabs off to Obsidian (or Raindrop now)

- Reboot

Feels good coming in on Monday to a fresh session.

simmons• 22 days ago

Yes, I remember feeling pride in the stability of my systems when I saw a large uptime. I had a server that had 1000 days of uptime, once. Now when I see a large uptime, I'm terrified of what security patches the kernel may be missing!

da-x2• 22 days ago

Thankfully there's livepatching (e.g. https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch )

fragmede2• 22 days ago

Ksplice came out of MIT in 2008, which updates your kernel while it's running. No need to reboot! Supports Ubuntu.

milesvp• 22 days ago

I still remember the days of servers as pets, rather than cattle, and I was harping about server uptime. A wizened server admin piped in and said he rebooted his servers once a week. Said, if you do it any less frequently, then the odds of catching an error causing change while the person who made said change (possibly himself) is still around and can remember what they did go down precipitously. So, to avoid headaches and potential downtime when it mattered, he would just take servers out of rotation and reboot them, and make sure they came back online.

mmh0000• 22 days ago

Live Kernel Patching has been around for about 20 years[-1] now.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux[1] and Oracle (Enterprise Linux) Unbreakable Linux[2] both use it as a selling point.

This feature is still a bit ad hoc because, in most setups, rebooting a system isn't a huge burden and is much simpler than using boutique commands to live-patch it.

[-1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice

[0] https://www.ksplice.com/

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/linux/what-is-linux-kernel-...

[2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/learn/ol-ksplice/

doublerabbit3• 22 days ago

    8:59PM  up 1858 days, 22:51, 1 user, load averages: 1.69, 2.21, 1.60
    dblrabbit@cookie:~ $ uname -a
    FreeBSD cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC amd64

    9:05PM  up 1859 days, 13 mins, 1 user, load averages: 1.19, 1.32, 1.39
    dblrabbit@mookie:~ $ uname -a
    FreeBSD mookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC amd64

    9:14PM  up 245 days,  8:46, 1 user, load averages: 1.26, 0.97, 0.91
    dblrabbit@dragoness:~ $ uname -a
    FreeBSD dragoness 16.0-CURRENT

Currently serving: vm's, dns, email, mx-relay, and multiple shoutcast radio relays 24/7 and some other miscellaneous stuff. Colocation is fun, do I win?

5years; I'm 37 now, I was 32. Life seemed easier then.

al_borland• 22 days ago

I worked in a place with a lot of Solaris servers with years-long uptime. It would be my job to patch them. Having no idea what config changes that may have happened over the last 3 years which would take effect on boot was always terrifying.

magicalhippo• 22 days ago

I remember installing some new computers for a small shop around y2k, and their NT4 server was acting up a bit when I was adding the new users to the domain controller.

I opened Task Manager to see if any processes was running wild. Imagine my surprise when I saw it had well over 1100 days of uptime!

znpy• 22 days ago

Restarting windows twice a day meant a productive day, back in the days of windows 98 (which by the way lived well past windows 2000 and windows xp)

w10-1• 22 days ago

At Javasoft there were Solaris test machines that had been up for 2+ years, and we had to reboot the windows test machines multiple times a day. It felt really good to leave a large queue of work at the end of the day on the Solaris/Sparc machines, knowing it would be done the next morning.

joeig• 22 days ago

I remember when I was asked to replace a core router with a more powerful model. The uptime of the Cisco router was ten years - and it was ten years after the datacenter went into service.

loloquwowndueo2• 22 days ago

I remember when Linux users were practically obsessive about uptime and restarting felt like a sign of failure

I remember it too, like it was yesterday. Wait - it was yesterday.

I see people rebooting Linux boxes to cargo cult trying to fix all kinds of issues and I’m like - rebooting is not a solution. This is not Microsoft Windows.

reaperducer• 22 days ago

and I’m like - rebooting is not a solution. This is not Microsoft Windows.

Reminds me of the old joke:

"Thank you for calling Dell support. Have you tried turning it off and on?"

raxxorraxor• 21 days ago

I mean linux boxes sometimes needed a lot of time to boot before SSDs became available. Today I reboot the system if I don't know the particular name of some systemd service I need to restart. So just restart everything!

To be honest, I would recommend doing that from time to time even on linux boxes. Not because the system becomes unstable, just to check if all your services come up as expected. For the case that you really do need to do a reboot at some point.

le-mark• 22 days ago

We had a vp of engineering at a retail place who came from windows shop and wanted to restart the servers every night of the holiday season. It took some doing but we finally convinced him “this is Linux we don’t have to that!”

denkmoon• 22 days ago

Feels like a distinction between server and workstation. I'd be ashamed to see only 7 days uptime on my servers D:

estetlinus• 22 days ago

I remember my good old PC with Windows around 2005. It wanted to reboot all the time and got stuck in an infinite updating cycle every time I did. It was a particularly lazy computer.

adrian_b• 22 days ago

One of my servers is used as an Internet gateway, so it hosts many network services, e.g. e-mail, DNS, NTP, DHCP etc.

That one (which runs FreeBSD) is rebooted perhaps once per year or even more seldom, when I do a kernel update or a hardware upgrade. If I would need to restart it for other reasons, e.g. memory leaks, that would be a failure of the OS.

On the other hand, with my main desktop PC (which runs Linux), frequently I leave it running some overnight job, but when that is not needed I always shut it down for the night.

I have never understood the people who like hibernation, because my computer has always been optimized to power up in some 10 to 20 seconds at most, and shaving a few extra seconds per day from that seems meaningless.

dspillett3• 22 days ago

This was at a time when Windows seemingly needed to restart once or twice a day, at least.

Ah, the NT days… An IP address has changed, your computer needs to be rebooted for this to take effect. You have moved your chair, your computer needs to be rebooted for this to take effect. You sneezed, your computer needs to be rebooted…

ectospheno• 21 days ago

If you aren’t rebooting a Linux box 15 to 30 times per year then you aren’t applying kernel security updates. I view uptime fanatics as walking security problems and assign an appropriately low trust value for their actions on computers in general.

nosioptar• 21 days ago

Not necessarily, live patching is possible.

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

ffitch3• 22 days 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.

gwbas1c3• 22 days ago

Uhm, do you have a virus or other spyware?

ffitch3• 22 days ago

hope not : ) I observed these across three computers on different versions of macOS.

bethekidyouwant2• 22 days ago

does logging out fix it?

wishfish• 22 days 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.

mrguyorama• 22 days ago

I can confirm this happened, at least in the past, with audio issues for me. If I didn't reboot recently, the audio would start stuttering under high CPU load, with lots of pops and crackles and junk.

This lasted many years, across multiple apple laptops, across multiple different OS versions, across multiple different Corporate management solutions!

Mac users, like Linux users, refuse to acknowledge that it can be possible for there to be a problem that they have not personally experienced. They never extend this doubt to problems on Windows.

This is why everyone believes Apple hardware is always flawless despite nearly every machine having serious design issues that hamper or even break the machine, like a display cable getting changed to be too short in a design update such that after a while your display goes really wonky in a way that is really difficult to google, such that your IT department wont figure out that it's a known and unfixed design fault, and spend weeks trying to reinstall the OS and other troubleshooting steps.

JTbane• 22 days ago

There are enough crappy win32 applications that you probably should restart Windows PCs nightly.

IAmBroom2• 22 days ago

The usual "Windoze suxxor amirite?" reply.

coldblues• 22 days 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.

lgeorget2• 22 days ago

I was about to comment that exactly. If you computer is never switched off, your encryption is permanently bypassed.

bluebarbet2• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

Unless you use iOS which properly handles clearing encryption keys when the device is locked.

petecooper2• 22 days 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

jmclnx• 22 days 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• 22 days 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).

gwbas1c3• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

Yes the good 'ol days when the user was considered the owner rather than a security liability. I do miss that philosophy immensely.

krembo• 22 days 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_Thastus3• 22 days 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.

denpa• 22 days ago

My Mac and Linux machine get a reboot every now and then. On the other hand, my work Windows machine, welp…

memcg• 22 days 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• 22 days 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-d...

arikrahman• 22 days ago

This is one of the features I appreciate with OneUI, I can set it to automatically restart it in the mornings.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 22 days ago

The people that I know, in the security field, restart their phones, multiple times per day.

Rendello• 22 days 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/

Cider99862• 22 days 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• 22 days 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

KennyBlanken4• 22 days ago

This isn't some magical GrapheneOS feature. iPhone and Android both do it as well.

bethekidyouwant2• 22 days 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 :(

apparent3• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

If you need "incognito" tabs that last longer, it might be worth looking into something like the Temporary Containers addon for Firefox.

apparent3• 22 days ago

Appreciate it, will check this out!

ChrisMarshallNY2• 22 days 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.

dv35z5• 22 days 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"

artisinal2• 22 days 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"

dv35z5• 22 days ago

Some would say "Chaotic evil". Some would say "Always be prepared!!"

Gigachad9• 22 days ago

If your computer has any kind of secure boot / boot chain attestation stuff going on, like all phones do now, rebooting clears out pretty much all malware. Software bugs can put the system in to a bad state which can be abused by malware, but none of it can persist through a reboot since everything is checked and measured from scratch during the boot.

hnuser123456• 22 days ago

This feels rather overstated. Your firmware check isn't going to tell you if a repo package installed/updated by your package manager got compromised, which is apparently increasingly common.

cube00• 22 days ago

any kind of secure boot / boot chain attestation [...] rebooting clears out pretty much all malware

IMHO "pretty much" understates the risk.

Malware can easily install itself as a system service, timer unit, XDG autostart or your shell profile among other places. I'll be the first to admit I never check all these places regularly.

The only thing that should be putting minds at ease is regular OS installs from fresh images.

Resist the temptation to do an "in place" upgrade and go with a clean ISO each time your distro comes out with a new major version.

It's a pain but thanks to configuration management or even shell scripts it's manageable for me now.

Admittedly six months is probably too long as well but at least it stops something lurking on a server or my desktop for years.

michaelmrose2• 22 days ago

Most methods of persisting state have absolutely nothing whatosoever with kernel or modules which are a powerful way to hide malicious activity but far from the only way to persist state including malicious state. The only sane response to being infected with malicious software is to reinstall everything starting with the OS and scan user files AFTER reinstalling.

It is possible even plausible that you can disinfect many sorts of malware from inside a compromised machine but it is inherently less trustworthy and installing from scratch barely takes any more time.

AdieuToLogic2• 22 days ago

Software bugs can put the system in to a bad state which can be abused by malware, but none of it can persist through a reboot since everything is checked and measured from scratch during the boot.

This does not account for supply chain attacks nor trojan attacks which seek consensual installation. A reboot will not eradicate these threat vectors.

ryangittins2• 22 days ago

Pivotal Labs

RIP Pivotal Tracker, and thank you for your involvement! It was a nice piece of software.

dv35z5• 21 days ago

Hoping someone will boot-up an open-source version. Linear seems to be the most popular alternative to Pivotal Tracker. What did you like most about Tracker? Thanks for the kind words!

weird-eye-issue• 22 days ago

Regarding browser tabs you can always just reopen Chrome and press control shift T to get your previous tabs even after a restart

dainank• 22 days ago

Indeed! You can even configure it to open the last set of open browser tabs as per default, saving you a `ctrl+shift+T`.

dspillett3• 22 days ago

I have mine set to do this automatically, though it sometimes fails, I think after some updates (though I've not looked into it enough to be confident this is the pattern). In these cases reopening the tabs/windows with ctrl+shft+T reopens most, bit not always all of them, and the ones that are lost seem quite arbitrary (it might be something I've had open for days or longer, or something I was looking as a short time before restarting).

PSA: Chrome's session restore function should not be trusted as a way of accurately maintaining state between restarts. I've not noticed the same with Firefox and Brave, though I don't currently use them as much (I'm slowly moving over to using mostly Brave or Firefox, I've not yet decided which…) so maybe they are no more reliable in this area.

rf153• 22 days ago

about what getting a computer into a productive state means

Why would you do that? Is your OS not running stable? Do you not have tight control over the software that is running? Why are you unable to keep it in a productive state?

Greetings from a Computer that only restarts for updates every few days, next to an airgapped machine that has been running for years.

jcattle• 22 days ago

Something something bit flips, something something stateful

dv35z5• 21 days ago

Good questions. For some "work" use-cases, it would be starting up Email, password tool (Bitwarden), team chat (Slack), browser (with a few tabs already open).

I am trying to get into a habit of writing/publishing, so I've got my own web-page that pops up at login, along with the code/text editor that allows me to start writing. Every individual will have their own set of "things I click on / open while sipping coffee, getting the computer into a productive state".

In the team / consulting environment (where we would pair-program, often with different people day-to-day), the computer would start with task tracker / backlog (at the time, Pivotal Tracker, now it would be something like Linear), team knowledge base for the project area. Under the hood, it would load up common shortcuts, terminal aliases, etc.

----

I often work with multiple clients, so something I've always wanted to do is have something close to "one Linux user per client", so that there isn't "contamination" between them. I haven't figured a great way to do this, but think of it a system-wide version of Chrome's switchable profiles.

deepsun• 22 days ago

One more forcing function I really like is to mount a tmpfs folder, and put all browser downloads there.

(Or I think making your ~/Downloads a symlink to /tmp/Downloads would do the same).

That way you don't clutter the Downloads, and catalogue anything important. The unimportant is recycled on each restart.

grimjeer• 22 days 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.

tamimio2• 22 days 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_Thastus3• 22 days ago

If the server can't be rebooted without anxiety, something has been configured very poorly.

zaik• 22 days 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.

zaptheimpaler2• 22 days 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!

tamimio2• 20 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

uptime: `up 35 days`

it feels bad in some sense but I don't like my environment being interrupted!

Night_Thastus3• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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_• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

0:43 up 204 days

I need to reboot

yerik• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 20 days ago

This might be nvidia driver thing, I've had similar soft-bricking happen on ubuntu as well

protocolture• 22 days 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.

contextfree• 22 days ago

Windows has been gradually "undocking" more and more stuff from the main OS install into separately updatable/restartable/etc components for a while.

zamadatix5• 21 days ago

Some things are easy to live patch, others are complex monsters.

The complex monsters tend to result in corner case considerations like "already open sockets cannot be upgraded but new ones will be" and a massive amount of testing to make sure the convenience saved is more than the risk of inconvenience due to some bug with a complex live patch.

Designing the whole system for live patching from day 1 can reduce the number of complex monsters but it's still more complex, and that's a ton of work (rebuild all or just shipping live patches) that could go into fixing other annoyances/limitations which are even mor inconvenient than rebooting for most users.

The result is some things support them in the most impactful cases, like certain types ofOS kernel updates, but most cases it's better to work on other conveniences instead.

n4r9• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 20 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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)

zamadatix5• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

I agree with the synthesis of what you said and the OP. Let mess grow then prune. Workspace as a garden.

byte_0• 22 days 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.

zamadatix5• 22 days 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.

anon2912• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

IMO the power of NixOS is at the other extreme. Set it up with 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.

anon2912• 21 days 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.

fferen• 22 days ago

Corporate windows laptop; need to restart every 2-3 days at best.

Marsymars2• 22 days ago

Thankfully I’ve got admin access on my corporate laptop so disabled this nonsense.

snailmailman4• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

No reason to keep it on.

any reason not to simply let it sleep?

foobarchu2• 22 days 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.

Barrin92• 22 days ago

doesn't clear up your ram. One big security reason for regular reboots is that you simply get rid of any potential non-persistent crap on your machine. Also performance obviously, with a full shutdown you get back to a known, clean state.

Worth noting on Windows the restart function only does that if you hold Shift or have Fast Startup disabled.

annzabelle2• 22 days ago

Tangent about clock drift: my phone (Pixel 9) drifts by about 5-10 minutes a day when in airplane mode. This doesn't sound like it would be a huge deal, but I do a lot of wilderness backpacking and very long flights where I'm keeping it in airplane mode for 36+ hours to save battery, and then at the end I need an accurate time to make the next flight or meet a ride.

Not really sure what to do about it because there is no official support for Pixels in this country.

y1n0• 22 days ago

Not judging, but I'm curious why you don't wear a watch?

DANmode• 22 days ago

Replace the CMOS battery yet?

snailmailman4• 22 days ago

I'm confident this will mostly fix my problem but its such a minor thing its not worth disassembling my PC for. But I will likely swap it out next time I disassemble it for any other reason.

It seems to me like this problem can be entirely solved in software if the OS more frequently resynced the clock. I checked just now and it last did a sync 2 days ago? I dont think my PC bios even saves sub-second accuracy, and IMO it should be resyncing after every boot.

The CMOS battery on my ~10yr old linux laptop is also dead, and its a complete non-issue there. The bios complains occasionally and shows me the time is wrong and then i boot in and the OS fixes the clock immediately.

DedlySnek• 22 days ago

I'm in the same boat. My work laptop is shut down everyday once I finish my work.

TMWNN• 22 days 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.

bluebarbet2• 22 days ago

Only when the OS security update requires it. Maybe once every couple of weeks on Ubuntu.

kevinrineer• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

I update the kernel frequently. I reboot when I'm sufficiently annoyed by not being able to use USB devices.

nickjj3• 22 days 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.

chimpanzee23• 21 days ago

24/7 for ~25 years

r u ok?

nickjj3• 21 days 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.

Krssst• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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.

GoblinSlayer4• 22 days ago

My old notebook periodically failed to boot, so I kept it running to not see it fail to boot.

sbstp• 22 days 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• 22 days 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...

zaptheimpaler2• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

Same here. But I hibernate it, which defeats the purpose.

142• 22 days 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.

bcraven• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

Desktop for gaming and Macbook get shut down when I'm not using them, the Mac Minis stay on.

supertroop• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

I'm running QubesOS, my various qubes reboot about a dozen times a day.

rf153• 22 days 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.

KennyBlanken4• 22 days ago

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• 22 days ago

Yeah, several times. Thanks windows.

paolfs2• 22 days ago

When you use disk encryption for security reasons it seems to me you need to turn off your computer after your done.

jorisw3• 22 days ago

Logging the user out would achieve the same no?

paolfs2• 22 days 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.

gorgoiler• 22 days 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.

VaderAi• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

Why?

jorisw3• 22 days ago

So what’s the actual benefit to rebooting according to this article?

142• 22 days ago

It gives you a chance to go to the bathroom of course.

zombot• 22 days 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.

gloosx2• 22 days 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• 22 days 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.

gloosx2• 22 days ago

The quality of the macos for sure degraded over time. My first MacOS was OSX Lion and after Windows 7 it was feeling like a sport car. Now I'm even scared of attempting this Tahoe upgrade, and I have to use some beta-toggle hacks to evade their intrusive notification pop-up begging me to update.

EagnaIonat• 22 days ago

You can use something like Grand Perspective app to find whats taking up all the space.

But for oddness like you mention, run a disk check to make sure it's ok. Failing that do a NVRAM reset.

https://www.macworld.com/article/224955/how-to-reset-a-macs-...

HlessClaudesman• 22 days ago

I also have a 500gb Mac. Recently I cleaned up HDD using Daisy Disk whilst asking Claude "do I need this?" questions.

Runs much better now.

InsideOutSanta2• 22 days ago

One of the best things I did on my Mac was disable Spotlight and use a search tool that doesn't rely on its index.

Spotlight used to be amazing, but my impression is that it has become really buggy in recent years, filling my disk with garbage and often using a lot of CPU on its indexing threads.

QuinceOver• 22 days ago

Interesting. Can you recommend the search tool that you use?

Cthulhu_3• 22 days ago

I have some hacks to make Spotlight not try to for example index the millions of various node_modules files, but it shouldn't need hacks to do so.

thefz• 22 days 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

Swap space?

thenthenthen2• 22 days ago

Yep

thenthenthen2• 22 days ago

I think its ram saved to disk everytime you sleep. It doesnt seem to get cleared and builds up over time

petecooper2• 22 days ago

Somehow my quite limited disk space (500GB) is getting lower and lower and lower to the point where spotlight will stop working.

I know you didn't ask, but check your Time Machine snapshots in Disk Utility. If you prefer a CLI approach, this should work:

  for d in $(tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates | grep "-"); do sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $d; done

RegW• 21 days ago

Also didn't ask about docker and "docker system prune".

msie• 22 days ago

Yup, "open all apps" seems to open apps I have closed before reboot. Seems like a longstanding bug to me.

Havoc• 22 days ago

Yeah on windows yesterday to fix a broken outlook. Some things never change

50208• 22 days ago

I shutdown / reboot ... this is blogpost and HN worthy?

thisisnotwifi• 22 days ago

Had to restart because of https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1sghrd2/we_found_a_t...

eimrine• 22 days 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-236• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

This is your bosses problem. Apply security patches and reboot. Find a book to read.

GTP3• 22 days 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.

throw-nodox-236• 22 days ago

Yeah.. that’s a bit where the shoe pinches.

We could just grab a book and lean back - but being 0.017% (!) of the total global workforce (we’re ~70) we’d easily be seen as insignificant if we continuously don’t meet our targets. So we’re a bit stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do we keep rolling our rock up the hill and keep going, or risk it rolling over us and squooshing us into oblivion? At this point, I’m really quite ’meh’ about it all. I guess my learning is to be very careful during acquisitions. But heck, the founders got rich and that’s their prerogative no matter my own personal views. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my job a lot and I still get paid - and fighting Big Brother and rolling this rock up the hill has almost become a sport (and running joke) here. Yesterday we noticed we were blocked from browsing an independent photographers portfolio while being prompted to use ’internal photography tooling’.

francisofascii• 21 days ago

Wish it was that easy. Unfortunately for many of us, our job is more about navigating roadblocks like ZScaler, negotiating with security people, and figuring out work-arounds, rather than focusing on developing software. Our bosses tell us to figure it out.

fernandotakai• 21 days ago

yup, that's exactly what i do.

if anything is making me less productive or just plain stopping my job, i raise an IT ticket, tell my manager and go for a walk.

Cthulhu_3• 22 days ago

I have the opposite problem; while zscaler isn't yet forced on us, updates and reboots are. At least system restarts for major updates are announced like a week in advance so there is still some leeway. But it's annoying that my React Native development environment needs to basically be reinstalled every two weeks. (this is all on MacOS btw)

dspillett3• 22 days ago

At least system restarts for major updates are announced like a week in advance so there is still some leeway.

Luxury.

My work machine used to do this, but I've had the current laptop reboot without warning while I'm actively using it (not actively giving input, but reading what is on-screen at the time).

GoblinSlayer4• 22 days ago

Why http1 wouldn't work for webdev?

throw-nodox-236• 21 days ago

Little annoyances mostly. Lighthouse reports giving worse scores, Sanity’s live editing starts acting very weird/not at all.

TZubiri• 22 days ago

but don't you have a separate personal computer that you own, and this cursed computer would be property of the company?

Otherwise if they are asking you to install this in your personal computer, I just wouldn't and I would submit a request to procurement for a corporate laptop.

throw-nodox-236• 21 days ago

Yeah totally - but the issue is doing work (which is a ’rare’ type of work in this massive org, so security policies are not catered for it) on my work laptop (:

Suzuran• 21 days ago

Your problem is not to circumvent security policies. Doing that places you at fault for whatever may happen. Reboot and comply fully with all security mandates. When productivity fails to meet expectations, that is a problem for your superiors to resolve, not you. Know your place and accept it.

icedchai5• 21 days ago

I know several developers that have been plagued by ZScaler and similar security tools. It takes weeks to get these issues resolved. Absolutely insane. Inevitably they wind up doing work from their personal laptops...

One guy I was working with was working on an AWS project. He couldn't access part of the AWS console because it was prohibited by ZScaler... Open a ticket, wait...

butlike2• 21 days ago

Please do not do work from your personal laptop. If the company doesn't want to troubleshoot their own tool which is preventing you from working, you shouldn't continue adding value until you're enabled again.

dominicrose• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

From the post I learnt about:

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_3• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

I've been forced to restart my computer when it crashed 3 months ago, otherwise, no, never, complete waste of time.

GTP3• 22 days 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.

mikhailfranco• 22 days ago

Windows 11 seems to feign forgetting your PIN password to force a restart.

Jeff9James• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days 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• 22 days ago

I restart my Mac every morning.

vermaden• 22 days 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
      }
    }

sylware• 21 days ago

1 - near my bed, have to stop it to sleep

2 - updating the kernel and drivers "often", have to restart it.

chimpanzee23• 21 days ago

thats the ideal tbh. no persistent state, except in your mind and soul.

everything else is transient. meditate on this.

bArray• 21 days 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• 21 days 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• 21 days 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.

butlike2• 21 days 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.

zamadatix5• 21 days 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• 21 days ago

Every single day.

fduran• 21 days 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...

jtr121• 20 days ago

Who are you surprisetalk, and what have you done to my poor little rant???

surprisetalk• 20 days ago

:-)

Have you restarted your computer this week?

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