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"

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.

At least if you trust the NSA's advice: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21018353/nsa-mobile-d...

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 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)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Tracking this as a task helps my digital hygiene, and at the same prevents me from doing it more often than needed.

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).

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 :)

Not sure how much is that quality of dev went down vs quantity of threats went up.

https://github.com/tw93/mole. (Clean, uninstall, analyze, optimize, and monitor your Mac from the terminal.)

How have I not heard of this before?

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.

To those who worship uptime, how many kmods do you have loaded? Must be nice not subscribing to openwall/NVD/CISA/cve.org

    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 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.

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

everything else is transient. meditate on this.

I guess not. However, this is sort of dishonest since I do sometimes do execute kill -1 or reload individual kernel modules.

[1] https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

I need to reboot

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.

2 - updating the kernel and drivers "often", have to restart it.

  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...

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.

Its like a Super AGENTIC android app. Oh, and great things dont come at a cost. Its free. twent.xyz