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!
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.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘“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.)
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.
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!
Thankfully there's livepatching (e.g. https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch )
Ksplice came out of MIT in 2008, which updates your kernel while it's running. No need to reboot! Supports Ubuntu.
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.
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.
> 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).
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'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.
Ahem... yeah... "were"...
I do actually reboot occasionally these days, because the world is so serious now.
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 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
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.
Wat? The apple silicon one on my desk restarts in under 30 seconds. Markedly faster than the Windows PC next to it
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uhm, do you have a virus or other spyware?
hope not : ) I observed these across three computers on different versions of macOS.
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, restarting is an occasional unfortunate workaround for subsystems that don't properly update in place (e.g. OS kernel).
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...
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.
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).
There are enough crappy win32 applications that you probably should restart Windows PCs nightly.
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).
Yes, a few times. Thank you for asking, I hope you restart your computer some as well. :)
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
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.
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
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
it can jump from wherever it is to your highly attractive ground line
Lightning is a special case because it will jump through the air, regardless of the surge switch status.
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 :)
‘“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.)
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.