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Have you restarted your computer this week?

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Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#41
post #22

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 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.

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

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#42

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.

> 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).

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#43
post #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…

Uhm, do you have a virus or other spyware?

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#44
post #22

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 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.

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

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#45
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 :)

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#46
post #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.

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

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#47
post #7

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…

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

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#48

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…

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

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#49
post #22

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 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.

Re: Have you restarted your computer this week?

#50
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).

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