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.
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'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).
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).
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.
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" 0 0 * * * sleep $((RANDOM % 86400)) && /usr/sbin/shutdown -r +5 "Rebooting in 5 minutes. Run 'shutdown -c' to cancel" 12 22 * * * kill 21342RIP Pivotal Tracker, and thank you for your involvement! It was a nice piece of software.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
Why is it this particular form of 'malware protection' always seems to involve a 30% fee?
Mobile platforms just got a clean slate to implement a new security model.
This does not account for supply chain attacks nor trojan attacks which seek consensual installation. A reboot will not eradicate these threat vectors.
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.
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.
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.
It’s borderline impossible to persist malware across reboots on iOS these days.
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.
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 know you didn't ask, but check your Time Machine snapshots in Disk Utility. If you prefer a CLI approach, this should work:
for d in $(tmutil listlocalsnapshotdates | grep "-"); do sudo tmutil deletelocalsnapshots $d; doneBut 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-...
Runs much better now.
Swap space?
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.
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…
You need to test when servers go down, and people who use them should know and understand what happens when the are off.
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
[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/linux/what-is-linux-kernel-...
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!
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
8:59PM up 1858 days, 22:51, 1 user, load averages: 1.69, 2.21, 1.60
dblrabbit@cookie:~ $ uname -a
FreeBSD cookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC amd64
9:05PM up 1859 days, 13 mins, 1 user, load averages: 1.19, 1.32, 1.39
dblrabbit@mookie:~ $ uname -a
FreeBSD mookie.server 12.2-BETA1 FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1 r365618 GENERIC amd64
9:14PM up 245 days, 8:46, 1 user, load averages: 1.26, 0.97, 0.91
dblrabbit@dragoness:~ $ uname -a
FreeBSD dragoness 16.0-CURRENT
5years; I'm 37 now, I was 32. Life seemed easier then.
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.
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.
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.
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"
(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.)
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.
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...
Every crash cuts deep if it doesn't resume correctly.
- Install all updates
- Save tabs off to Obsidian (or Raindrop now)
- Reboot
Feels good coming in on Monday to a fresh session.
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.
Reminds me of the old joke:
"Thank you for calling Dell support. Have you tried turning it off and on?"
I do actually reboot occasionally these days, because the world is so serious now.
It's less than 20 seconds to a usable desktop even on windows, some optimizations aren't worth the hassle.
If nothing else, think of the power usage!
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.
At least if you trust the NSA's advice: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21018353/nsa-mobile-d...
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
Tracking this as a task helps my digital hygiene, and at the same prevents me from doing it more often than needed.
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.
Every now and then I might take the time to sweep through and nuke them all, but that might take months or years.
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.
Not really sure what to do about it because there is no official support for Pixels in this country.
Overall not a huge problem, but it is annoying.
Charges from solar and can get time updates over Multiband 6 if your region has coverage.
any reason not to simply let it sleep?
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.
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.
Worth noting on Windows the restart function only does that if you hold Shift or have Fast Startup disabled.
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.
frankenpad25 vermaden ~ % uname -prism
FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE-p6 amd64 amd64 GENERIC
frankenpad25 vermaden ~ % uptime --libxo=json | jless | jq
{
"uptime-information": {
"time-of-day": "12:50PM",
"uptime": 790654,
"days": 9,
"hours": 3,
"minutes": 37,
"seconds": 34,
"uptime-human": "9 days, 3:38",
"users": 15,
"load-average-1": 2.72,
"load-average-5": 2.54,
"load-average-15": 2.00
}
}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)
"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.)
Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.
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.
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.
Kind of reminds me of how slow Windows computers used to boot back in the Vista and 7 era.
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.
At one instance, I rolled over to a coworker who has just rebooted theirs and had a whole 5+ minute conversation.
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.
On my Macbook I always use sleep since there are no downsides.
- 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
Needing to shut down to me indicates something is broken.
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
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.
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.
Electricity also wears down electronic components, so I think it also shortens the lifespan of your PC parts.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
In that scenario, shutting it off seems better. But it might roast itself on start up anyway.
Either way, I just always used sleep-mode.
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?
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.
Stuff like Windows Defender doesnt even really ask if you want to install the update anymore, it just installs the new virus definitions immediately.
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.
...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.
https://github.com/tw93/mole. (Clean, uninstall, analyze, optimize, and monitor your Mac from the terminal.)
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.
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.
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.
Do you have some unusual hardware that requires a driver, or otherwise install something that requires a driver?
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.
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.
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).
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.
Hybernate will also lock your disk.
Edit: it might depend on your hardware. The latest Macs are more secure while sleeping / logged out.
Not sure how much is that quality of dev went down vs quantity of threats went up.
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
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.
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.
To those who worship uptime, how many kmods do you have loaded? Must be nice not subscribing to openwall/NVD/CISA/cve.org
Just recently bought a new NVme so I had to reformat, but went 80+ days without a reboot.
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.
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
That's not how electricity works. Hot may be open but your ground and return is not.
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.
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.
Then again, I primarily use a desktop, so that probably factors in.
I guess not. However, this is sort of dishonest since I do sometimes do execute kill -1 or reload individual kernel modules.
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.
it feels bad in some sense but I don't like my environment being interrupted!
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
13:37:37 up 257 days 21:20, 1 user, load average: 5.19, 5.04, 5.63
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 need to 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 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).
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 :)
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.)
uptime
Very rarely there's a published kernel fix leading to an exploit that could potentially affect my setup that requires rebooting, but that is exceedingly rare.
FWIW my desktop regularly reaches six months of uptime and I had a server at OVH which I kept just because I could that reached something silly like 3400 days of uptime (it just didn't reach 10 years). At some point (after maybe three years) the uptime was so cool I decided to just keep it and see how long it'd stay up (and, no, that one wasn't secure at all: kids, don't try this at home). When the fire at OVH took entire bays off, I wasn't affected so the thing kept cranking.
If we leave security concerns aside, OSes are really that stable now (unless we're talking about Microsoft products of course).
> Have You Restarted Your Computer This Week?
Now of course I've got something like 12 computers at home so it really depends which computer you're talking about. For example I've got a server with ECC memory that runs VMs and containers but... I only need it when I'm awake. So that one I typically turn off at night (for the energy consumption). I know, I know: desktop up and server down at night I must be doing something wrong right? But then it's my setup and I do what I want.
Did you have a different qualification in mind?
Its like a Super AGENTIC android app. Oh, and great things dont come at a cost. Its free. twent.xyz
Have you restarted your computer this week?
https://taonaw.com/2026/06/27/have-you-restarted-your-computer.html