Have you restarted your computer this week?

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.

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"

  0 0 * * * sleep $((RANDOM % 86400)) && /usr/sbin/shutdown -r +5 "Rebooting in 5 minutes. Run 'shutdown -c' to cancel"

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.

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 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.

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...

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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"

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.

> 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.

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.

No, restarting is an occasional unfortunate workaround for subsystems that don't properly update in place (e.g. OS kernel).

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).

I shut my computers all the way down when I'm done with them. I like a clean slate when I return.

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.

No I power it off first and then I start it up again

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.

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.

So what’s the actual benefit to rebooting according to this article?

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.

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.

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’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.

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...