Every night, I put my computer to sleep. But should I be shutting it down every now and then? For example, maybe once a week or once a month?
Just curious to see this question answered from a Linux gamers’ perspective.
I prefer shutting it down over sleep, because theres always some shit that doesn’t work after wakeup
I always shut mine off, I worry about the low quality hardware.
I always shut down my PC. No need to keep it wasting electricity (even a little) when I’m away and I can wait a bit for it to boot again
I shutdown my computer whenever I’m done using it.
I’m old. For me, a PC is like a TV or radio. When I’m done using it, I turn it off.
Which means saving my work and shutting it down. I don’t put it to sleep or standby. And I set my session manager to start a new session every time.
People who keep unsaved documents and hundreds of browser tabs open are weird. Use bookmarks!So, 2 old people here, and counting. I finish my day with ‘paru - Syu’ and followed by 'poweroff" almost every day. The only exception is if I move away from my PC and then decide I’m just not going back that day.
well, i keep tons of tabs open AND use a lot of bookmarks
Turning your TV off and on frequently shortens its lifespan significantly, You know… Honestly, turning anything off and on frequently shortens its lifespans significantly, even lightbulbs.
The last TV I owned was a CRT in a wooden frame with several darts stuck in it, and it had lasted since the 90s.
Always gonna be someone that argues.
Hell, if I said Nuclear Bombs were dangerous, someone would come in and be all like " Yeah, well, you say that, but Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived two atomic bombs, so they cant be that dangerous!"
When I bookmark a site that pretty much guarantees I’m never going to visit it again.
Now I have a thousand bookmarks that I’m afraid to dig through.
I bookmark any site I find relevant with “search terms” as key words, so the site shows up as suggestion when I enter one of the terms in the search bar.
It’s like a self-curated local search engine for sites I find useful.This is something a thoughtful and rational person would do.
I am usually one or the other, never both, unfortunately.
My IRL filing system for bills/legal documents is shoving them into a shoe box. When the shoebox fills up I get a pair of shoes and start fresh.
The upside to this is that everything is roughly sorted chronologically by geological layers.
I connect to your filing system on an emotional level.
I use a sophisticated prioritized filing system.
Top priority (“must deal with today”) documents go in the pile on my desk.
When that pile falls over onto my keyboard, it is (unread, of course) added to the pile on the floor next to my desk.
Once every leap year, or when there’s a full solar eclipse (whichever happens later), I go through the floor pile and throw out everything that isn’t relevant anymore.
All the time. When I’m not using my PC it’s off. Why would I keep it on, it boots up in seconds.
For me the advantage of keeping it in sleep is having all the apps open and exactly where I left them. “Session save” type features never keep things quite right - some apps just don’t reopen, they’re often not on the right workspace etc, not to mention documents and so on have to be saved if you power off.
You can of course use hibernation to get the best of both worlds, at the cost of long start-up times, and so I do often do that, when I’m not expecting to turn back for a while.
Personally I prefer to always start off from scratch where I can. If I need to go away from the computer and things are in a fragile state or where the setup is finicky and I’ll be finishing it next session then I’ll just put it to sleep.
Sounds crazy to me that people aren’t shutting down their computers when not using them. For me it’s like turning off the light off in a room you’re leaving. I can still hear the voice of my mum giving me a lecture about not wasting energy and I’m thankful for this.
It’s such a small gesture and it can already improve your carbon footprint a tiny bit.
The only exception is when I’m downloading a game or backing up my computer.
Uhhh yeah. My PC is booted in less than half a minute, why would I let it waste energy the whole night just to boot slightly faster? Even when I booted off of an HDD I still did so.
I find sleep is still a bit quirky on Linux. Every once an a while it’ll get stuck in sleep mode and I can’t bring it back to life - forcing a hard reset via pulling the power.
So I just shut it down. I wouldn’t have an issue just always shutting down, but ddr5 memory training is annoying and I wish it didn’t behave so slow on startup.
I was experiencing a similar issue, and I may have fixed it by expanding my swapfile from 2GB to 16GB. I usually start having wake issues every 2-3 days, but I’m officially on my first full week without any issues since expanding my swapfile.
I found that with external monitor, sometimes the monitor sleep seems to not let OS wake up fully because of no display. I solved it with kdeconnect. If system doesn’t wake properly then running the “display on"command or " logout” command from phone revived it.
I see no point in keeping my power hungry monster awake 24/7. I’m in any game less than 3 minutes after a cold boot.
Mines been keeping me warm through the last months of snow storms.
Automated backups happen at night.
Whenever you do major updates you should reboot. Most patches can be live applied, but not all.
Usually your package manager will mention if there’s a need to reboot when it’s done. Once a week to once a month is fine for the most part. Kinda depends on the updates that are coming out and how often you do them.
Yep, this.
It varies from distro to distro, but its generally a good idea to do a full reboot after a major update.
I make it a part of my morning ritual:
Set up some tea and run a full update check, reboot, just cuz.
It makes more sense because I like tea, and I don’t have it running anything that needs to be up 24/7.
i shutdown my pc every time i stop using it. i didnt know there are ppl out there that dont
Same
I always shut down my PC when not using it. Never had an issues with any of my games (Pop!_OS and a 3090 GPU).
My server is the only thing that’s on 24/7. My and my partner’s PCs shut down while we’re not using them. It takes like 10 seconds, maybe, to boot up.
If you mean by “should”, because you fear losing performance, like Windows, then no. But I also see no point in keeping it on 24/7. When I’m done with my computer, I just turn it off. If I want to play a video game, the absolute maximum amount of time it takes for me is 120 seconds until I’m in a game from cold start. Constantly feeding my power-hungry monster just isn’t worth it.
My computer a 7900xtx and 7800x3d with a crap load of other stuff shoved in there. Idles around 100-150 watts of power with the screen off.
100 watts isn’t a lot, but that’s like leaving a light bulb or two on from when I was a kid!
Unless Im playing an idle game that needs it on just let it hibernate.
