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Have you restarted your computer this week?

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Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#11

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 so…

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

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#12
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

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#13

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 so…

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.)

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#15
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.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#17

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 so…

> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed

Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#18
post #12

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.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#19
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.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#20
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.
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