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.
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.
During the next calibration call, your manager can't be like, "well he spent 8 hours each week resetting up his machine after a reboot, so we need to give him credit for that too."
Your job is to deliver impact, not fight system configurations.
Indeed. The configuration isn't your responsibility, but it becomes so if you try to circumvent it and something goes wrong. What would the manager say during the calibration call if a ransomware infection started from this employee's laptop, after they disabled the company-mandated security software? They probably wouldn't even care to figure it out if the security product in question would've been able to stop that specific ransomware.
If you think so you've only ever worked in a trash org. If my productivity was hurt by things outside my control I'd expect (and have had) managers to fight for me.
This has to be the most depressing comment I've read this week. I assure you, not all places are like this. Especially mid-smalll, but even some pockets inside large-mega.
What company will promote you for rebooting your machine?
Maybe you’re not gonna get fired, but I can’t imagine someone hitting staff level because they spent a third of their week recovering from a weekly reboot
I can't believe the level of pushback we're getting on this point. Most of these people have probably never been in those meetings.
Person A: Not able to accomplish anything because security blocked essential...
Person B: Shipped product F, look at this impact to our KPI. Saved costs by retiring service C. Mentored little jimothy.
Who get the base salary bump and bonus allocation in that scenario
There are two critical conversations during this meetings:
Do we promote this guy? Do we fire this guy?
It doesn’t matter what the excuse is or the size of the company, if you don’t have impact for the next level you’re not promoted. Put simply, you’re not getting promoted rebooting your machine.
Maybe your boss can defend you from a conversation, especially if the problem is systematic (impacting the whole team).
Ideally you’d just leave a shithole company like this (of course these days it might be exactly feasible..)
I suppose filling out a ticker or two every day and constantly bothering IT non-stop might be rhetorical best option (assumings one has enough energy for that)
This is the right attitude, but others often refuse to press the issue. The only way this crap gets fixed is for it to cost the company enough lost productivity (and money) to make it worth fixing. If the intent is to "be secure", fix it. And fix it correctly. Don't have every developer on the same project asking for access to AWS and opening their own tickets... It's insane.
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.
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’.
I think you have Stockholm syndrome. It's not worth having any loyalty to such an organization. Since they don't want you to work, just spend your working hours looking for a new job.
I hear you! And it’s not like I haven’t considered it - thing is I really do enjoy the work I get to do in this agency (which is this tiny pixel in the tapestry of Big Org CO). It’s varied, impactful, and I can morally stand behind a large portion of the projects I’m on.
It’s just that.. we’re owned by Big Brother, they have little involvement in what we do other than this compliance hullabaloo.
But we’re all trying to David the sh*t out of our Goliath - and to some extent we’ve actually been successful.
But really I just wanted to share a story as to why I haven’t restarted my laptop in ages! Happy it lead to some fun conversations though.
The market being bad is exactly the reason to start looking for a new job now. It's probably going to be a long process, so you shouldn't wait to start it before being fired / put on a PIP / etc.
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)
> 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).
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.
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...
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.
I agree with you, but other developers will tell me they can't meet a deadline if they do that, and have no choice. In today's shaky job market, they don't want to rock the boat too much, which I can understand.
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.
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 (:
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"
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!
As I recall there wasn't an abundance of notice of Pivotal Tracker's sunset, but I did kind of expect someone to come up with a more 1:1 open-source replacement with a one-step migration tool.
We looked at Linear and other options but ultimately ended up going with Shortcut. We wrote our own small migration script and moved over the old Pivotal IDs to keep as much historical context as we could. Shortcut's been a good tool overall, though I preferred Pivotal's Goldilocks level of compactness as far as the UI was concerned, as well as the general design.
Pivotal's API was tidy and integrated nicely into our development process. We have some git aliases such as `git start <branch>` where the branch name will end with a story ID by convention. The alias would do the work of creating the branch, setting the remote to the dev's fork of our repo, marking the story as started, and assigning the dev as the owner. It saved a lot of manual steps, so thank you for your involvement in the project which allowed such a nice workflow!
I would love to see an open-source one exist, potentially using open formats like Markdown / SQLite which could run locally or on a network share, and could potentially "live" inside of the repository.
I'm currently in LATAM, and often teach students - so having a no-cost tool which supports agile development would be so valuable (rather than having yet another tool to create a login for)
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.
> 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.
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.
Thank you for putting in the time to produce this answer. Amazing and unorthodox way of using the user system, I haven't even considered that. I can see that being useful.
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.
> 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.
If you go with an immutable OS like Fedora Silverblue or Bazzite, every single update is a clean ISO install. And then in your user only install things through Flatpak while checking there aren't dangerous permissions enabled you will be much better off than a normal linux setup were mutations can be placed all over the place in a way that is impossible to audit or secure.
With flatpak, every app would have it's own virtual home to store config files, and for editing documents they can use the portals feature to allow the user to open files without having full filesystem access.
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.
It's more relevant on ios/Android where you can't through normal means install malware at the system level. Linux is moving in this direction with immutable OSs and better secure boot support but there isn't an easy way to have a secure linux desktop setup currently.
Exploits break out of the sandbox for higher system access. Rebooting flushes them out because the exploits have abused some memory bug to load custom code in the system, but this can not persist a reboot since everything gets cyrptographically verified on boot.
This is why things like the Nintendo Switch hacks and iphone jailbreaks have to be reloaded every time the system reboots, while they could modify the system files to try to persist the malicious code, it would simply leave the device unbootable since the boot chain attestation process would refuse to boot when the checksum doesn't match. The malware can only come back when the initial bug has been triggered again, through receiving a malicious text message attachment for example.
It doesn’t. You get exactly the same protections on Graphine OS with Fdroid. It’s just difficult to retroactively sandbox applications on the desktop because it’s a breaking change.
Mobile platforms just got a clean slate to implement a new security model.
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.
If you know for sure you have been infected with malware then it’s better to reinstall. But on iOS/Android and any other OS with strong boot chain security you can proactively reboot your device periodically and wipe out malware you weren’t aware of.
It’s borderline impossible to persist malware across reboots on iOS these days.
> 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.
It relies on your software to be properly sandboxed and permissioned.
What we have seen is state funded hacking groups can often exploit bugs which break out of sandboxes and embed themselves in the system. But the malicious code only exists in memory, it can’t persist between reboots because the next boot would fail the checksum and signature checks.
Which is why security focused OSs will periodically reboot themselves to flush out possible malware and why jailbreaks and hacks for phones and game consoles usually have to be reinitiated after every boot.
MacOS has a few measures including SIP and boot chain security to implement this, though it’s currently hard to set up a properly secure Linux desktop.
> It relies on your software to be properly sandboxed and permissioned.
And organizations rely on their employees not falling for phishing email. How well has that worked?
> What we have seen is state funded hacking groups can often exploit bugs which break out of sandboxes and embed themselves in the system. But the malicious code only exists in memory, it can’t persist between reboots because the next boot would fail the checksum and signature checks.
"Malicious code existing only in memory" is patently false by not addressing supply chain attacks previously mentioned. To wit, the npm left-pad attack[0]. See also the thousands of PHP CVEs.
This is true, which is why it's extremely hard to create a secure linux desktop today. But things are moving in the right direction, if you use Wayland + Flatpak on a immutable OS with secureboot set up you are in a much better position than a standard distro.
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.
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!
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.
So true. We have one older, rather large machine in a data center that's been up for.. (checks uptime): 963 days. It has IPMI but at some point something stopped working and now we have to physically go to the data center to restart it. And since we use it every day we can't really afford to lose access to it.
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.
Live patching exists but it tends to cap out at around a year of updates for any particular kernel version. It's not getting you anywhere near 1000 days.
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.
I had a box set up as NAT (running amazon linux) when we moved from a local datacenter to AWS in 2012. Shut it down last year. It had not been rebooted. Should have grabbed a screen capture of the uptime. Part of me wanted to leave it to reach 5000 days....
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.
There's also `systemctl soft-reboot` which initiates a userspace-only reboot, which quickly restarts the system without going through the full hardware and kernel initialization process.
I'm glad to see this. Almost 18 years ago I implemented a similar kexec device+memory preservation for a storage vendor. It was done on a Linux kernel of that day, and it had had a memory reservation and handoff protocol between the two kernels to keep some specific PCI device alive, allowing for state restoration at the application side. I'm proud of the fact that the kernel replacement was just under 1 second in execution (after init process optimization) and the whole kernel+app was less than 10 seconds.
Was hoping this would be mentioned. This version of functionality will probably be more universally accessible to all configurations as compared to the soft reboot released in 254:
Soft rebooting was even more exciting for me, but I wasn't able to get it to work on my bluebuild based system (customized universal blue). I haven't tried it in a while though.
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!
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.
> 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…
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.
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.
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.
Just close them. You're never going to read them. If you really think there's something you need, export the browser state to an archive file, then delete in 10 years after you've never consulted it once.
(Disclaimer: I'm aware that there may be valid reasons for this workflow, but in most cases it's just digital hoarding and the above advice is sorely needed. If you really need 1800 tabs, you know who you are and you can safely ignore me.)
Brave has a function to bookmark all open tabs. I have used that from time to time. Or just made a temp file and written all the URLs to it, in case I want to open a few/dozen of them after rebooting.
I think all browsers have that now. I use it 3-4 times a year with Safari on both macOS and iOS. That way I feel comfortable closing them all without worrying about “losing” anything.
I’ve been doing this, or something similar, for at least 15 years now. Dozens of mass-bookmark “folders”. I’ve never once looked at the bookmarks I made, not a single time. I even have old bookmark files archived here and there, from machines and browsers for which the bookmarks weren’t auto-backed-up to “cloud” storage like my Safari stuff is. As soon as I can get a local llm running that’s up to the task, I’ll probably have it build some kind of table with categorization out of all of them, then have it edit out entire categories of crap until I have something I might actually scan over to recover a few interesting tidbits. Finally make some use of them, now that tools can take enough of the pain out to make that a less-daunting prospect.
The irony is that now, in the LLM age, it wouldn't be that hard to feed a few thousand browser tabs and/or bookmarks into a vector database or whatever and then if some fuzzy memory tickles your brain about something you saw a year ago, you can just query it.
It's the same logic as keeping RAW digital photos. Lightroom is already gaining "find the keepers" AI features. Sooner or later it'll be possible to feed a bunch of burst shots into an AI that just weren't worth the trouble to manually sort through. The AI can do the drudge-work of digging up any gems in the rough...
how do you see how many tabs you have open, an extension? i have tab session manager and it shows i have 80 tabs. about 60 of those are ephemeral, and the other 20 i'd have open on a new browser anyhow (email x3, goog cal, caldav cal, nextcloud files, router, local and remote proxmox, navidrome, the documentation server, etc) everything else is superfluous. although i'd probably be a bit sad if i lost all my tabs right now; hence tab session manager.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
This is actually useful for smartphones. Sometimes smartphone malware is capable of infecting a device but not persisting, so reboots clean it back up.
Huh, interesting. I wanted to see how to enable this on iPhone, and the answer is that it’s built into iOS 18+ and will happen automatically after 3 days of no usage.
Yep, on GrapheneOS you can set it to a very short period (IIRC it is 10 minutes, don't have my phone here). Shorter timeframes than 3 days is useful in a lot of circumstances. I think in most scenarios where some agency uses Cellebrite or alike, they'll just make sure to do it immediately after confiscating a phone and not after three days.
It's another example of iOS security theater. It can be sold as "Apple cares about privacy", but it does not add that much meaningful security. (Just like: iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but it doesn't really matter because most people don't enable ADP and only have iCloud Backups that are encrypted at rest.)
I remember something where on maybe mainstream Androids you'd have to fully turn off in order to turn it into BFU, but maybe it does just by restarting now.
You may be unfamiliar with its history. It was, for several years, a GrapheneOS feature. ("Magical" is up to the reader.) After much encouragement from the GOS team, Google, and separately Apple, implemented it years later.
GrapheneOS's implementation of it still remains the most robust. More info:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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
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.
I leave my phone off for most of the day, and 100% of the time that it's on it's in battery saver mode. In any case, it's an irrelevant comparison, because a phone's thermals have nothing in common with a laptop's thermals.
So I don't have to spend 10-15 minutes saving all my open files (including the scratchpad ones I haven't named) and then later reopening all my applications, recreating all of my tmux windows and panes, setting up my vim splits and tabs again, and starting all of my stopped Docker containers?
I have a feeling someone is going to jump in with a "solution" to each of these forgetting that lots of work is ephemeral/transient and undeserving of even the slightest bit of automation or pre-configuration.
It takes ages to cold boot. My desktop is ok-ish, but it doens't matter since I only use it occasionally.
My old HP laptop had a slow-ass BIOS that I was convinced had some kind of bug. I replaced it with a brand spanking new thinkpad 2-3 months ago. Guess what? The freaking BIOS is EVEN SLOWER somehow!
They all wake up instantly from sleep.
I therefore only shut them down when I know they'll be unplugged for a while, because for some reason the HP eats through the battery even when off. If suspended, the battery will be out of juice in like two days. Haven't tried any of this with the Lenovo yet.
Suspend used to work great, but since MS figured they should copy Apple half-assedly, suspend is borken. And I have really no idea what we've gained in exchange.
Now that I have an nvme SSD in all my computers and boot times are roughly 10-15 seconds or so unless something has gone wrong, the advantage of sleeping is somewhat mitigated.
Back in the spinning rust era, though, a good unsuspend could be something like 50 times faster to get to a running computer. Possibly more, depending on what your OS needed to start up.
It is still more convenient to have my previous environment most of the time, and still faster to unsuspend than boot, but it isn't as much of an advantage as it used to be, no.
On Windows and Linux it is better to just turn it off because sleep is broken on most hardware. But on Mac there is next to no advantage to doing that. MacOS sleep is also more of a hybrid between sleep and hibernate where it will after enough time offload the ram to the SSD and fully power down so the machine can be in "sleep" without any power drain.
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
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.
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.
I'm glad it works for you, but I have witnessed several coworkers restart their macbooks (some M1, some M2, possibly M3) and I don't think I've ever seen a reboot shorter than about two minutes.
At one instance, I rolled over to a coworker who has just rebooted theirs and had a whole 5+ minute conversation.
I don't know what current Windows 11 does, but my typical Linux Mint is single-digit seconds, and my t490 is 7 years old already. Windows 10 is a bit slower but still single second territory. With more current hardware we are talking about 2 seconds plus whatever BIOS needs, see sibling comments. Maybe you have corporate AV on the Windows PC, or funny drivers?
It does indeed boot to desktop in ~30 seconds (including BIOS time), however it then sits there loading services and tray apps for another 30 seconds before it becomes responsive. TBF, I could probably eliminate a lot of that if I were motivated to strip it down
That's a perfectly acceptable practice for apps that only ever have one window. For document-based apps or apps that have multiple windows, usually the convention on Mac is for closing the last window to not also quit the app. But of course there are exceptions in both directions, it's not a hard and fast rule.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not having to stop sessions of all kinds of things and restart them for no good reason.
It doesn't require it to stay up, and if things were better at retaining state across restarts I would care less, but it's a nuisance to have to log back into things, and get things back exactly how I left them.
I often have half a dozen projects up on different virtual desktops, and leaving them how they were when I worked on it last makes it easier to get back up to speed.
EDIT: I used to leave screen sessions running on servers instead, as the workaround to having to reboot my local machine. But it's nice not to need to.
Nothing requires it. But if I turn off my computer, it takes 15s or so to boot up. If I leave it on, it's available for me instantly. The latter is a more pleasant experience, so I gravitate towards it.
Different reasons. Mine is on the table and I use it more like a desktop. It will just idle when I'm not around, because I come and go often. My current uptime shows on Debian 30 days, 49 min.
Although... 30 days is maybe a bit misleading, because I ran some heavy shaders without thinking that triggered the GPU watchdog and forced me out of my session. I think killing all user processes is almost like a reboot, although not according to uptime.
Energy savings, freeing up resources, allowing to apply security updates, reducing strain on battery, giving you a clean start after booting, closing network connections, etc.
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.
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.
I do typically, but I haven't always been the best at managing watch charge. It's a coros fitness watch and I've killed it on some hikes by using the GPS too much.
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.
Yeah, i just simply don't trust the sleep functionality to not be buggy. I walk away with processes running a decent amount of the time and its unclear to me what things can prevent sleep from triggering and what cant.
If i do need to have something persist overnight I use hibernate. And I haven't encountered issues with that. But ive had enough issues with sleep states on my laptops that i just dont bother on my desktop. The monitor goes to sleep if i walk away but the PC doesn't sleep.
With fast boot, it is a partial-hibernate (as you said, it is basically logging out then hibernating). But also, you are shutting the device down. You can hibernate a laptop and take the battery out. The device is off. Thats the difference between sleep and hibernate. Sleep still uses power.
Hibernate is a true power off, with instructions for the PC to load ram from disk on next boot. IME hibernate often works more reliably, because sleep states can be buggy, and hibernate just powers off the device. Hibernate is slower though, and can have its own issues (often related to disk encryption)
Sleep being buggy is a mystery to me, but has happened on nearly every laptop i've owned. I think too many things can wake slept device or prevent sleep. Leading to "I closed my laptop and put it in my bag. Then it woke up and got hot and span the fans until it died". But ive also had many instances where some apps are more buggy after waking from sleep (ive had issues like video playback failing after wake, presumably related to hardware video decode), or certain peripherals don't handle it well, and windows reshuffles monitors or changes a microphone since the "default" was briefly gone, or a mouse/keyboard doesnt wake the device from sleep when they should, etc. Phones and tablets seem to handle low power states really well, but ive literally never had a good experience with it on a laptop or desktop.
It's not unusual to have sleep state issues on Linux, which is what it runs (an Arch derivative).
Could be some faulty hardware somewhere, but it's not a concerning enough issue to spend money replacing things for a machine that gets used for personal projects and video games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Lightning is electricity that goes through hundreds of meters or even kilometers of air (supposedly a good electrical insulator) to reach the ground, it's not above travelling through electrical lines the opposite way they're intended to be used.
No. This isn't some theoretical Star Trek neutrino emissions scenario. Lightning punches-out wherever it hits, including ground, which is directly connected to neutral.
i think this isn't common knowledge; as it's only tied at one panel, and separate in the other (in the US); so there's two busses in the main breaker panel, one for white and one for green/bare. It's only the utility/ingress panel that has the neutral and ground bonded. It's a fluke of the way we deliver power in the US, split phase, maybe.
High voltage electric arcs can be surprisingly long. The tiny cap in strip is not enough to protect in nearby hits. For that fully disconnecting or proper separation is need.
i thought half of lightning came from the ground, like half the potential. Slow mo lightning strikes have them meeting in the center in the air, rather than striking from cloud to ground. I could be wrong.
Lightning hit an antenna that was disconnected but near a radio and blew up the radio, the PC it was connected to, and then everything connected to the switch that was connected to the PC via cat5, and just for good measure, everything connected to an outlet on that side of the house within 15' of the computer outlet. once it gets in, it doesn't matter if stuff is off or on or whatever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No extra hardware, stock macbooks and an imac. No fancy apps either, RayCast is probably the only one that overrides default system behavior. It used to be better, a few years ago macOS would run stable for months, but even then I had to resort to ‘killall Dock’ for occasional glitches.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘“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.)
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
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.
This is your bosses problem. Apply security patches and reboot. Find a book to read.
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.
> It is their resposibility to figure this out.
You're responsible for your own career.
During the next calibration call, your manager can't be like, "well he spent 8 hours each week resetting up his machine after a reboot, so we need to give him credit for that too."
Your job is to deliver impact, not fight system configurations.
Indeed. The configuration isn't your responsibility, but it becomes so if you try to circumvent it and something goes wrong. What would the manager say during the calibration call if a ransomware infection started from this employee's laptop, after they disabled the company-mandated security software? They probably wouldn't even care to figure it out if the security product in question would've been able to stop that specific ransomware.
If your boss is not able to back you up for something like this, it's time to change job.
During the compensation calibration meetings, there is no boss in the world that would be able to argue anything to your benefit
If you think so you've only ever worked in a trash org. If my productivity was hurt by things outside my control I'd expect (and have had) managers to fight for me.
This has to be the most depressing comment I've read this week. I assure you, not all places are like this. Especially mid-smalll, but even some pockets inside large-mega.
What company will promote you for rebooting your machine?
Maybe you’re not gonna get fired, but I can’t imagine someone hitting staff level because they spent a third of their week recovering from a weekly reboot
I can't believe the level of pushback we're getting on this point. Most of these people have probably never been in those meetings.
Person A: Not able to accomplish anything because security blocked essential... Person B: Shipped product F, look at this impact to our KPI. Saved costs by retiring service C. Mentored little jimothy.
Who get the base salary bump and bonus allocation in that scenario
There are two critical conversations during this meetings:
Do we promote this guy? Do we fire this guy?
It doesn’t matter what the excuse is or the size of the company, if you don’t have impact for the next level you’re not promoted. Put simply, you’re not getting promoted rebooting your machine.
Maybe your boss can defend you from a conversation, especially if the problem is systematic (impacting the whole team).
Ideally you’d just leave a shithole company like this (of course these days it might be exactly feasible..)
I suppose filling out a ticker or two every day and constantly bothering IT non-stop might be rhetorical best option (assumings one has enough energy for that)
If only it took as long to close a ticket as to open one.
Ah yes of this we are well aware. Don’t tell anyone!
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.
This is the right attitude, but others often refuse to press the issue. The only way this crap gets fixed is for it to cost the company enough lost productivity (and money) to make it worth fixing. If the intent is to "be secure", fix it. And fix it correctly. Don't have every developer on the same project asking for access to AWS and opening their own tickets... It's insane.
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.
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’.
I think you have Stockholm syndrome. It's not worth having any loyalty to such an organization. Since they don't want you to work, just spend your working hours looking for a new job.
> I enjoy my job a lot
I'll be real with you, I wouldn't make a throwaway account to talk about a bad company policy if I enjoyed my job.
I'd recommend looking for another, the job market is nowhere near as bad as people claim (at least for non-junior positions).
I hear you! And it’s not like I haven’t considered it - thing is I really do enjoy the work I get to do in this agency (which is this tiny pixel in the tapestry of Big Org CO). It’s varied, impactful, and I can morally stand behind a large portion of the projects I’m on.
It’s just that.. we’re owned by Big Brother, they have little involvement in what we do other than this compliance hullabaloo.
But we’re all trying to David the sh*t out of our Goliath - and to some extent we’ve actually been successful.
But really I just wanted to share a story as to why I haven’t restarted my laptop in ages! Happy it lead to some fun conversations though.
The market being bad is exactly the reason to start looking for a new job now. It's probably going to be a long process, so you shouldn't wait to start it before being fired / put on a PIP / etc.
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)
> 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).
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.
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...
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.
I agree with you, but other developers will tell me they can't meet a deadline if they do that, and have no choice. In today's shaky job market, they don't want to rock the boat too much, which I can understand.
Why http1 wouldn't work for webdev?
Little annoyances mostly. Lighthouse reports giving worse scores, Sanity’s live editing starts acting very weird/not at all.
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.
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 (:
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.
A slightly more fun version:
Some would say "Chaotic evil". Some would say "Always be prepared!!"
Chaotic evil is my favorite article from The Daily WTF:
Some would say, "Oh, Windows Update again"
I’m glad _someone_ is working on bringing the windows experience to Linux!
That is no longer up to date, Windows doesn't do it anymore (forced "random" updates with restart), at least in my experience. And I use it daily.
> Pivotal Labs
RIP Pivotal Tracker, and thank you for your involvement! It was a nice piece of software.
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!
As I recall there wasn't an abundance of notice of Pivotal Tracker's sunset, but I did kind of expect someone to come up with a more 1:1 open-source replacement with a one-step migration tool.
We looked at Linear and other options but ultimately ended up going with Shortcut. We wrote our own small migration script and moved over the old Pivotal IDs to keep as much historical context as we could. Shortcut's been a good tool overall, though I preferred Pivotal's Goldilocks level of compactness as far as the UI was concerned, as well as the general design.
Pivotal's API was tidy and integrated nicely into our development process. We have some git aliases such as `git start <branch>` where the branch name will end with a story ID by convention. The alias would do the work of creating the branch, setting the remote to the dev's fork of our repo, marking the story as started, and assigning the dev as the owner. It saved a lot of manual steps, so thank you for your involvement in the project which allowed such a nice workflow!
Here's a list of Pivotal Tracker-inspired tools. https://bye-tracker.net/
Some potentials:
- Lanes: https://lanes.pm/
- Brooklyn Tracker: https://www.brooklyntracker.com/
- Tracker Boot: https://trackerboot.com/
- Story Time: https://storytime.team/
I would love to see an open-source one exist, potentially using open formats like Markdown / SQLite which could run locally or on a network share, and could potentially "live" inside of the repository.
I'm currently in LATAM, and often teach students - so having a no-cost tool which supports agile development would be so valuable (rather than having yet another tool to create a login for)
Regarding browser tabs you can always just reopen Chrome and press control shift T to get your previous tabs even after a restart
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.
Indeed! You can even configure it to open the last set of open browser tabs as per default, saving you a `ctrl+shift+T`.
> 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.
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.
Thank you for putting in the time to produce this answer. Amazing and unorthodox way of using the user system, I haven't even considered that. I can see that being useful.
Something something bit flips, something something stateful
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.
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.
> 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.
If you go with an immutable OS like Fedora Silverblue or Bazzite, every single update is a clean ISO install. And then in your user only install things through Flatpak while checking there aren't dangerous permissions enabled you will be much better off than a normal linux setup were mutations can be placed all over the place in a way that is impossible to audit or secure.
Not for $HOME and ~/.profile and such.
With flatpak, every app would have it's own virtual home to store config files, and for editing documents they can use the portals feature to allow the user to open files without having full filesystem access.
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.
It's more relevant on ios/Android where you can't through normal means install malware at the system level. Linux is moving in this direction with immutable OSs and better secure boot support but there isn't an easy way to have a secure linux desktop setup currently.
On phones malware is more restrained by the sandboxing. But now the reboot isn't necessary in the first place.
Exploits break out of the sandbox for higher system access. Rebooting flushes them out because the exploits have abused some memory bug to load custom code in the system, but this can not persist a reboot since everything gets cyrptographically verified on boot.
This is why things like the Nintendo Switch hacks and iphone jailbreaks have to be reloaded every time the system reboots, while they could modify the system files to try to persist the malicious code, it would simply leave the device unbootable since the boot chain attestation process would refuse to boot when the checksum doesn't match. The malware can only come back when the initial bug has been triggered again, through receiving a malicious text message attachment for example.
> This is why things like the Nintendo Switch hacks and iphone jailbreaks have to be reloaded every time the system reboots,
Why is it this particular form of 'malware protection' always seems to involve a 30% fee?
It doesn’t. You get exactly the same protections on Graphine OS with Fdroid. It’s just difficult to retroactively sandbox applications on the desktop because it’s a breaking change.
Mobile platforms just got a clean slate to implement a new security model.
If I remember correctly the Pegasus spyware worked only until a reboot and then the attacker had to reinfect the phone again.
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.
If you know for sure you have been infected with malware then it’s better to reinstall. But on iOS/Android and any other OS with strong boot chain security you can proactively reboot your device periodically and wipe out malware you weren’t aware of.
It’s borderline impossible to persist malware across reboots on iOS these days.
The topic is computers which is normally casually this means PCs, laptops desktops and other form factors none of which share this character.
> 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.
It relies on your software to be properly sandboxed and permissioned.
What we have seen is state funded hacking groups can often exploit bugs which break out of sandboxes and embed themselves in the system. But the malicious code only exists in memory, it can’t persist between reboots because the next boot would fail the checksum and signature checks.
Which is why security focused OSs will periodically reboot themselves to flush out possible malware and why jailbreaks and hacks for phones and game consoles usually have to be reinitiated after every boot.
MacOS has a few measures including SIP and boot chain security to implement this, though it’s currently hard to set up a properly secure Linux desktop.
> It relies on your software to be properly sandboxed and permissioned.
And organizations rely on their employees not falling for phishing email. How well has that worked?
> What we have seen is state funded hacking groups can often exploit bugs which break out of sandboxes and embed themselves in the system. But the malicious code only exists in memory, it can’t persist between reboots because the next boot would fail the checksum and signature checks.
"Malicious code existing only in memory" is patently false by not addressing supply chain attacks previously mentioned. To wit, the npm left-pad attack[0]. See also the thousands of PHP CVEs.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
This is true, which is why it's extremely hard to create a secure linux desktop today. But things are moving in the right direction, if you use Wayland + Flatpak on a immutable OS with secureboot set up you are in a much better position than a standard distro.
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.
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!
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.
So true. We have one older, rather large machine in a data center that's been up for.. (checks uptime): 963 days. It has IPMI but at some point something stopped working and now we have to physically go to the data center to restart it. And since we use it every day we can't really afford to lose access to it.
This is kind of like making sure your backups actually work.
You need to test when servers go down, and people who use them should know and understand what happens when the are off.
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/
Live patching exists but it tends to cap out at around a year of updates for any particular kernel version. It's not getting you anywhere near 1000 days.
5years; I'm 37 now, I was 32. Life seemed easier then.
I had a box set up as NAT (running amazon linux) when we moved from a local datacenter to AWS in 2012. Shut it down last year. It had not been rebooted. Should have grabbed a screen capture of the uptime. Part of me wanted to leave it to reach 5000 days....
I dunno how much easier life was back in May 2021... a year into the pandemonium, heh.
Easier for some, harder for others. The economy was more unfucked because the government printed tons of free money (mostly to business owners).
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.
Ksplice came out of MIT in 2008, which updates your kernel while it's running. No need to reboot! Supports Ubuntu.
Thankfully there's livepatching (e.g. https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch )
6.19 added a new Live Update Orchestrator, which allows significantly more of the system to be retained while doing a kexec / Kernel Handover like transisiton to a new kernel too. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.19-Live-Update-LUO https://lwn.net/Articles/1033364/
Systemd added support in recent 2.61. Theres also now ways to have user stores, that survive across switches. https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-261
There's also `systemctl soft-reboot` which initiates a userspace-only reboot, which quickly restarts the system without going through the full hardware and kernel initialization process.
But that doesn't give you kernel updates, being userspace only?
Real men use: killall -9
I'm glad to see this. Almost 18 years ago I implemented a similar kexec device+memory preservation for a storage vendor. It was done on a Linux kernel of that day, and it had had a memory reservation and handoff protocol between the two kernels to keep some specific PCI device alive, allowing for state restoration at the application side. I'm proud of the fact that the kernel replacement was just under 1 second in execution (after init process optimization) and the whole kernel+app was less than 10 seconds.
Was hoping this would be mentioned. This version of functionality will probably be more universally accessible to all configurations as compared to the soft reboot released in 254:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/releases/tag/v254
Soft rebooting was even more exciting for me, but I wasn't able to get it to work on my bluebuild based system (customized universal blue). I haven't tried it in a while though.
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!
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.
> 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…
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
200 tabs? The children of summer are still among us, it seems (he says, glancing at the current tab count of slightly over 1800).
Just close them. You're never going to read them. If you really think there's something you need, export the browser state to an archive file, then delete in 10 years after you've never consulted it once.
(Disclaimer: I'm aware that there may be valid reasons for this workflow, but in most cases it's just digital hoarding and the above advice is sorely needed. If you really need 1800 tabs, you know who you are and you can safely ignore me.)
Brave has a function to bookmark all open tabs. I have used that from time to time. Or just made a temp file and written all the URLs to it, in case I want to open a few/dozen of them after rebooting.
I think all browsers have that now. I use it 3-4 times a year with Safari on both macOS and iOS. That way I feel comfortable closing them all without worrying about “losing” anything.
I’ve been doing this, or something similar, for at least 15 years now. Dozens of mass-bookmark “folders”. I’ve never once looked at the bookmarks I made, not a single time. I even have old bookmark files archived here and there, from machines and browsers for which the bookmarks weren’t auto-backed-up to “cloud” storage like my Safari stuff is. As soon as I can get a local llm running that’s up to the task, I’ll probably have it build some kind of table with categorization out of all of them, then have it edit out entire categories of crap until I have something I might actually scan over to recover a few interesting tidbits. Finally make some use of them, now that tools can take enough of the pain out to make that a less-daunting prospect.
The irony is that now, in the LLM age, it wouldn't be that hard to feed a few thousand browser tabs and/or bookmarks into a vector database or whatever and then if some fuzzy memory tickles your brain about something you saw a year ago, you can just query it.
It's the same logic as keeping RAW digital photos. Lightroom is already gaining "find the keepers" AI features. Sooner or later it'll be possible to feed a bunch of burst shots into an AI that just weren't worth the trouble to manually sort through. The AI can do the drudge-work of digging up any gems in the rough...
how do you see how many tabs you have open, an extension? i have tab session manager and it shows i have 80 tabs. about 60 of those are ephemeral, and the other 20 i'd have open on a new browser anyhow (email x3, goog cal, caldav cal, nextcloud files, router, local and remote proxmox, navidrome, the documentation server, etc) everything else is superfluous. although i'd probably be a bit sad if i lost all my tabs right now; hence tab session manager.
Sideberry
I think I have found my soulmate :)
Every crash cuts deep if it doesn't resume correctly.
2616. On an iPad pro. I am not updating the os because I am pretty sure that the current behavior is a bug. The hard limit has always been 500.
… Why…?
Think of it as a memory aide combined with a to-do list.
I can't. My mind explodes just having 10 tabs open. I need a clean browser, done with whatever, close tab. Reopen if I need that site again.
The implication here is that “done with whatever” happens, rather than “start another thing” while the previous thing is still in progress.
And an indictment of the favorites/bookmarks UX
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.
Not necessarily, live patching is possible.
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!”
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.
Ahem... yeah... "were"...
I do actually reboot occasionally these days, because the world is so serious now.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
So you’re not using full disk encryption? Typing the encryption password is probably slower than systemctl | grep to find what you need to restart.
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?"
Feels like a distinction between server and workstation. I'd be ashamed to see only 7 days uptime on my servers D:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ehm, isn't that going to System Settings -> Spotlight -> Privacy options and adding the folder(s) there?
Interesting. Can you recommend the search tool that you use?
I use Find Any File, but there are several others I haven't tested, so I'm not sure which is best. FAF works for me.
>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:
Also didn't ask about docker and "docker system prune".
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-...
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.
I think its ram saved to disk everytime you sleep. It doesnt seem to get cleared and builds up over time
Yup, "open all apps" seems to open apps I have closed before reboot. Seems like a longstanding bug to me.
> 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?
Yep
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.
Same here. But I hibernate it, which defeats the purpose.
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.
Windows doesn't shut down by default.
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.
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!
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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...
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.
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
Huh, interesting. I wanted to see how to enable this on iPhone, and the answer is that it’s built into iOS 18+ and will happen automatically after 3 days of no usage.
Yep, on GrapheneOS you can set it to a very short period (IIRC it is 10 minutes, don't have my phone here). Shorter timeframes than 3 days is useful in a lot of circumstances. I think in most scenarios where some agency uses Cellebrite or alike, they'll just make sure to do it immediately after confiscating a phone and not after three days.
It's another example of iOS security theater. It can be sold as "Apple cares about privacy", but it does not add that much meaningful security. (Just like: iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but it doesn't really matter because most people don't enable ADP and only have iCloud Backups that are encrypted at rest.)
I remember something where on maybe mainstream Androids you'd have to fully turn off in order to turn it into BFU, but maybe it does just by restarting now.
This isn't some magical GrapheneOS feature. iPhone and Android both do it as well.
You may be unfamiliar with its history. It was, for several years, a GrapheneOS feature. ("Magical" is up to the reader.) After much encouragement from the GOS team, Google, and separately Apple, implemented it years later.
GrapheneOS's implementation of it still remains the most robust. More info:
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113450215897626825
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/300621/20240115/grapheneo...
https://www.simplymac.com/ios/new-apple-security-feature-reb...
https://9to5google.com/2025/04/16/android-auto-restart-secur...
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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/
This is one of the features I appreciate with OneUI, I can set it to automatically restart it in the mornings.
The people that I know, in the security field, restart their phones, multiple times per day.
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.
> 24/7 for ~25 years
r u ok?
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.
Have you also measured TBW on your SSD?
SMART stats shows it's at 54% health remaining, all tests passed without errors.
The drive might be too old to report back TBW. It's a Crucial 256 GB SATA 3.1 SSD.
It has LBAs written which is 138292009426. The sector size is 512 bytes.
I think you can calculate TBW from that?
(138292009426 * 512) / 1000000000000 = ~70.8 TB written?
Yes, and I have 250GB Evo Samsung with similar stats, of same age and power on time.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree with the synthesis of what you said and the OP. Let mess grow then prune. Workspace as a garden.
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 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.)
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
That's what swap is for.
> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed
Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.
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.
Sure. Do you shut off your phone every time you put it in your pocket?
I leave my phone off for most of the day, and 100% of the time that it's on it's in battery saver mode. In any case, it's an irrelevant comparison, because a phone's thermals have nothing in common with a laptop's thermals.
With Apple, it’s nearly the same software and CPU architecture, so yes, it is relevant. I don’t know anyone who turns their iPhone or Mac Book off.
What's the point of sleeping your computer? If you are not using it then it's better to just turn it off
So I don't have to spend 10-15 minutes saving all my open files (including the scratchpad ones I haven't named) and then later reopening all my applications, recreating all of my tmux windows and panes, setting up my vim splits and tabs again, and starting all of my stopped Docker containers?
I have a feeling someone is going to jump in with a "solution" to each of these forgetting that lots of work is ephemeral/transient and undeserving of even the slightest bit of automation or pre-configuration.
funny, decent text editors like VS Code save even the unnamed unsaved files
Vim~ #emacs#
some of us use more than text editors.
It takes ages to cold boot. My desktop is ok-ish, but it doens't matter since I only use it occasionally.
My old HP laptop had a slow-ass BIOS that I was convinced had some kind of bug. I replaced it with a brand spanking new thinkpad 2-3 months ago. Guess what? The freaking BIOS is EVEN SLOWER somehow!
They all wake up instantly from sleep.
I therefore only shut them down when I know they'll be unplugged for a while, because for some reason the HP eats through the battery even when off. If suspended, the battery will be out of juice in like two days. Haven't tried any of this with the Lenovo yet.
Suspend used to work great, but since MS figured they should copy Apple half-assedly, suspend is borken. And I have really no idea what we've gained in exchange.
Now that I have an nvme SSD in all my computers and boot times are roughly 10-15 seconds or so unless something has gone wrong, the advantage of sleeping is somewhat mitigated.
Back in the spinning rust era, though, a good unsuspend could be something like 50 times faster to get to a running computer. Possibly more, depending on what your OS needed to start up.
It is still more convenient to have my previous environment most of the time, and still faster to unsuspend than boot, but it isn't as much of an advantage as it used to be, no.
On Windows and Linux it is better to just turn it off because sleep is broken on most hardware. But on Mac there is next to no advantage to doing that. MacOS sleep is also more of a hybrid between sleep and hibernate where it will after enough time offload the ram to the SSD and fully power down so the machine can be in "sleep" without any power drain.
If you turn it off, it might attempt a 45 minute update when you start it again (yes this has happened to me with macos).
The same reason that you don't do a full shutdown every time you walk away from your computer. I don't really believe that you don't understand this.
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
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.
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.
What’s crazy is that boot time was a headline feature of Snow Leopard.
Are they MDM'd? If so that's the MDM's fault, not the OS.
Wat? The apple silicon one on my desk restarts in under 30 seconds. Markedly faster than the Windows PC next to it
I'm glad it works for you, but I have witnessed several coworkers restart their macbooks (some M1, some M2, possibly M3) and I don't think I've ever seen a reboot shorter than about two minutes.
At one instance, I rolled over to a coworker who has just rebooted theirs and had a whole 5+ minute conversation.
FWIW, I experienced the same, and worse, with corporate managed Macs.
Yeah, I have seen this with CrowdStrike-alike management software too. No idea what they put in that shit
I don't know what current Windows 11 does, but my typical Linux Mint is single-digit seconds, and my t490 is 7 years old already. Windows 10 is a bit slower but still single second territory. With more current hardware we are talking about 2 seconds plus whatever BIOS needs, see sibling comments. Maybe you have corporate AV on the Windows PC, or funny drivers?
It does indeed boot to desktop in ~30 seconds (including BIOS time), however it then sits there loading services and tray apps for another 30 seconds before it becomes responsive. TBF, I could probably eliminate a lot of that if I were motivated to strip it down
I used to have a Thinkpad with Arch+Xfce. It was ready to go from restart to desktop in 3-4 seconds. The "catch" was that I was booting from a NVMe.
That is not true, when you close apps on macOS the process(es) really are finished, just like on Windows or Linux.
I think they think of "closing an app" as closing its windows, which on Mac does not always "Quit" the app.
Right, I see. That is the traditional behaviour but there’s lots of apps that don’t do that, and closing the last window does also quit the app.
That's a perfectly acceptable practice for apps that only ever have one window. For document-based apps or apps that have multiple windows, usually the convention on Mac is for closing the last window to not also quit the app. But of course there are exceptions in both directions, it's not a hard and fast rule.
For sure, I agree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I never shut off my Windows laptop. Just close it. Once a month or so when there's a major update it gets rebooted.
my every day use macbook I expect 150+ days uptime before something goes wonky that forces a reboot
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.
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.
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
Not having to stop sessions of all kinds of things and restart them for no good reason.
It doesn't require it to stay up, and if things were better at retaining state across restarts I would care less, but it's a nuisance to have to log back into things, and get things back exactly how I left them.
I often have half a dozen projects up on different virtual desktops, and leaving them how they were when I worked on it last makes it easier to get back up to speed.
EDIT: I used to leave screen sessions running on servers instead, as the workaround to having to reboot my local machine. But it's nice not to need to.
Nothing requires it. But if I turn off my computer, it takes 15s or so to boot up. If I leave it on, it's available for me instantly. The latter is a more pleasant experience, so I gravitate towards it.
Different reasons. Mine is on the table and I use it more like a desktop. It will just idle when I'm not around, because I come and go often. My current uptime shows on Debian 30 days, 49 min.
Although... 30 days is maybe a bit misleading, because I ran some heavy shaders without thinking that triggered the GPU watchdog and forced me out of my session. I think killing all user processes is almost like a reboot, although not according to uptime.
What can possibly require a laptop to be shut down instead of put to sleep?
Energy savings, freeing up resources, allowing to apply security updates, reducing strain on battery, giving you a clean start after booting, closing network connections, etc.
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.
I can't remember the last time I got a new PC because the old one broke, vs. because I wanted one that was better.
As for being wasteful, sure, but it adds up to an insignificant rounding error of my total energy use so it's not something I lose any sleep over.
Reboot wears down electronic components too.
How much power is consumed when suspended?
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!"
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.
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.
Not judging, but I'm curious why you don't wear a watch?
I do typically, but I haven't always been the best at managing watch charge. It's a coros fitness watch and I've killed it on some hikes by using the GPS too much.
Overall not a huge problem, but it is annoying.
Something like the Casio GW-M5610-1ER would be good option.
Charges from solar and can get time updates over Multiband 6 if your region has coverage.
There's many cheap watches with effectively infinite battery. But no gps
>No reason to keep it on.
any reason not to simply let it sleep?
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.
Yeah, i just simply don't trust the sleep functionality to not be buggy. I walk away with processes running a decent amount of the time and its unclear to me what things can prevent sleep from triggering and what cant.
If i do need to have something persist overnight I use hibernate. And I haven't encountered issues with that. But ive had enough issues with sleep states on my laptops that i just dont bother on my desktop. The monitor goes to sleep if i walk away but the PC doesn't sleep.
> sleep and hibernate states on my desktop are pretty finicky
That is not normal...
Also, if you're on Windows, unless you disabled Fast Boot, you're not actually shutting it down. It's logging you out and suspending to disk.
With fast boot, it is a partial-hibernate (as you said, it is basically logging out then hibernating). But also, you are shutting the device down. You can hibernate a laptop and take the battery out. The device is off. Thats the difference between sleep and hibernate. Sleep still uses power.
Hibernate is a true power off, with instructions for the PC to load ram from disk on next boot. IME hibernate often works more reliably, because sleep states can be buggy, and hibernate just powers off the device. Hibernate is slower though, and can have its own issues (often related to disk encryption)
Sleep being buggy is a mystery to me, but has happened on nearly every laptop i've owned. I think too many things can wake slept device or prevent sleep. Leading to "I closed my laptop and put it in my bag. Then it woke up and got hot and span the fans until it died". But ive also had many instances where some apps are more buggy after waking from sleep (ive had issues like video playback failing after wake, presumably related to hardware video decode), or certain peripherals don't handle it well, and windows reshuffles monitors or changes a microphone since the "default" was briefly gone, or a mouse/keyboard doesnt wake the device from sleep when they should, etc. Phones and tablets seem to handle low power states really well, but ive literally never had a good experience with it on a laptop or desktop.
It's not unusual to have sleep state issues on Linux, which is what it runs (an Arch derivative).
Could be some faulty hardware somewhere, but it's not a concerning enough issue to spend money replacing things for a machine that gets used for personal projects and video games.
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.
I'm in the same boat. My work laptop is shut down everyday once I finish my work.
Replace the CMOS battery yet?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was about to comment that exactly. If you computer is never switched off, your encryption is permanently bypassed.
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.
Unless you use iOS which properly handles clearing encryption keys when the device is locked.
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)
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.
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.
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
>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.
that's an interesting thought but would violate physics for lightning to come in through the ground line?
Lightning is electricity that goes through hundreds of meters or even kilometers of air (supposedly a good electrical insulator) to reach the ground, it's not above travelling through electrical lines the opposite way they're intended to be used.
No. This isn't some theoretical Star Trek neutrino emissions scenario. Lightning punches-out wherever it hits, including ground, which is directly connected to neutral.
i think this isn't common knowledge; as it's only tied at one panel, and separate in the other (in the US); so there's two busses in the main breaker panel, one for white and one for green/bare. It's only the utility/ingress panel that has the neutral and ground bonded. It's a fluke of the way we deliver power in the US, split phase, maybe.
High voltage electric arcs can be surprisingly long. The tiny cap in strip is not enough to protect in nearby hits. For that fully disconnecting or proper separation is need.
i thought half of lightning came from the ground, like half the potential. Slow mo lightning strikes have them meeting in the center in the air, rather than striking from cloud to ground. I could be wrong.
Lightning hit an antenna that was disconnected but near a radio and blew up the radio, the PC it was connected to, and then everything connected to the switch that was connected to the PC via cat5, and just for good measure, everything connected to an outlet on that side of the house within 15' of the computer outlet. once it gets in, it doesn't matter if stuff is off or on or whatever.
“Ground is 0v everywhere” is a rule of thumb with a surprisingly limited scope of validity, not physics.
it can jump from wherever it is to your highly attractive ground line
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lightning is a special case because it will jump through the air, regardless of the surge switch status.
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.
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.
My old notebook periodically failed to boot, so I kept it running to not see it fail to boot.
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
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?
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.
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.
This might be nvidia driver thing, I've had similar soft-bricking happen on ubuntu as well
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.
Windows has been gradually "undocking" more and more stuff from the main OS install into separately updatable/restartable/etc components for a while.
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.
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 the good 'ol days when the user was considered the owner rather than a security liability. I do miss that philosophy immensely.
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.
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.
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.
does logging out fix it?
Uhm, do you have a virus or other spyware?
hope not : ) I observed these across three computers on different versions of macOS.
I've been using MacOS for 20 years and I haven't encountered it. I rarely reboot.
Do you have some unusual hardware that requires a driver, or otherwise install something that requires a driver?
No extra hardware, stock macbooks and an imac. No fancy apps either, RayCast is probably the only one that overrides default system behavior. It used to be better, a few years ago macOS would run stable for months, but even then I had to resort to ‘killall Dock’ for occasional glitches.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I shut my computers all the way down when I'm done with them. I like a clean slate when I return.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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!
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)
No, restarting is an occasional unfortunate workaround for subsystems that don't properly update in place (e.g. OS kernel).
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.
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...
So what’s the actual benefit to rebooting according to this article?
It gives you a chance to go to the bathroom of course.
No I power it off first and then I start it up again
For Windows, this may not be enough: https://m.majorgeeks.com/content/page/the_truth_about_window...
Indeed, power off and power on sometimes doesn't even reset uptime.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
Who are you surprisetalk, and what have you done to my poor little rant???
:-)
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.
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.
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 :)
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).
BSD daily driver too.
Just recently bought a new NVme so I had to reformat, but went 80+ days without a reboot.
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.
If you need "incognito" tabs that last longer, it might be worth looking into something like the Temporary Containers addon for Firefox.
Appreciate it, will check this out!
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.
Had to restart because of https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1sghrd2/we_found_a_t...
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?
> 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.
Desktop for gaming and Macbook get shut down when I'm not using them, the Mac Minis stay on.
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).
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
I update the kernel frequently. I reboot when I'm sufficiently annoyed by not being able to use USB devices.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Why?
Nope. When I want to know when was the last time I came back from vacation, I type this at the CLI:
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.
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.
Corporate windows laptop; need to restart every 2-3 days at best.
Thankfully I’ve got admin access on my corporate laptop so disabled this nonsense.
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...
I've been forced to restart my computer when it crashed 3 months ago, otherwise, no, never, complete waste of time.
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.
If the server can't be rebooted without anxiety, something has been configured very poorly.
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!
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.
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.
Nope.
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.
When you use disk encryption for security reasons it seems to me you need to turn off your computer after your done.
Logging the user out would achieve the same no?
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.
I've always assumed that (a derivative of) the user's password decrypts their section of the filesystem.
(env-godsart) kernel_2026 git:(main) uptime 0:44 up 445 days, 10:50, 18 users, load averages: 5.03 4.35 3.73
notice that for some hw parts restart ≠ shutdown & reboot. if you really want to start fresh, shut your machine down once a week.
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.
Windows 11 seems to feign forgetting your PIN password to force a restart.
My Mac and Linux machine get a reboot every now and then. On the other hand, my work Windows machine, welp…
Only when the OS security update requires it. Maybe once every couple of weeks on Ubuntu.
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.
There are enough crappy win32 applications that you probably should restart Windows PCs nightly.
The usual "Windoze suxxor amirite?" reply.
Yes, a few times. Thank you for asking, I hope you restart your computer some as well. :)
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 :)
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.
thats the ideal tbh. no persistent state, except in your mind and soul.
everything else is transient. meditate on this.
I restart my Mac every morning.
Yeah, several times. Thanks windows.
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.
0:43 up 204 days
I need to reboot
I shutdown / reboot ... this is blogpost and HN worthy?
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.
uptime: `up 35 days`
it feels bad in some sense but I don't like my environment being interrupted!
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.
Every single day.
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.
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.
1 - near my bed, have to stop it to sleep
2 - updating the kernel and drivers "often", have to restart it.
I'm running QubesOS, my various qubes reboot about a dozen times a day.
Yeah on windows yesterday to fix a broken outlook. Some things never change
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.
‘“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.)
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-...>
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Because someone submitted it, and people found it interesting and upvoted it.
Did you have a different qualification in mind?
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