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 run fedora atomic which needs to reboot for updates. I usually update and shutdown every night, so i get the updates running the next day when i start the computer.
I pretty much only ever shut down if I need to open the case for some reason, or if the battery dies.
There is occasionally an update where things don’t work right without rebooting, but shutting down is pretty much completely unnecessary unless you’re concerned about power consumption.
One should consider power consumption regardless of the price. If it is no server, you can prolong the life of your hardware not running it 24/7.
I shut down after every use on my Linux gaming PC. My Linux servers (I currently have 3) stay on for weeks on end without being rebooted, but I try to reboot at least once a month, but I forget most months.
I shut down because, in my opinion, I want my SSDs to last longer and them not being on when not in use is my way of ensuring that. I don’t game every day, but I do usually every other day, so for them to be on for 24 hours without me using them is potentially wasting time health-wise, in my opinion. Admittedly I haven’t done the research to see how reboots affect health of an SSD, because it may be counter productive in that light if a reboot causes just as much if not more stress than just leaving it on.
But SSD health is not the only reason. My other reason is that my PC is somewhat beefy and draws a lot of power and I’m charged a shit ton in electricity costs as it is and this thing can potentially cost me a few dollars each month of being on without being in use, especially during peak hours when my rates get outrageously expensive, at double the normal rate.
And then performance is the last remaining reason. But that might be Windows PTSD where I’m just used to Windows being a butt when it hasn’t been rebooted in some time. I just feel I get the best performance when I give my PC a break when I’m not using it.
My brother uses Windows and leaves his PC on all the time and just puts it to sleep and he doesn’t seem to have issues requiring him to reboot. He games every day whereas I’m not always using my gaming PC.
Edit: got me curious about this so I finally just skimmed through some articles really quick. Apparently SSD health is not really a concern on more modern M.2 NVME type drives which is what I have (I do have one older SATA SSD) and booting may do more writes than just leaving them on, but the modern drives are built to handle this but heat is still a concern. But at the end of the day, this is just a small part of why I do. The power bill is my main reason since it can cost me a few bucks keeping it on when not in use. Performance is secondary too. Likely won’t be that bad keeping it on all the time like I do with my Linux servers.
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 unplug the PC when I’m done. There are regular thunderstorms during this season.
So power surges happen from time to time. To prevent my PC from frying I completely cut the power source after I’m done and away from home. And since I’m using an old ass dell monitor (really should start looking for an modern one) I don’t have to keep the monitor connected to power for pixel cleaning.
I’m no expert, but using Linux as well, I do reboot mostly since A: my pc wakes up randomly when put to hibernation (haven’t fixed it yet). B: I’m using SSDs so a cold boot takes no time at all.
What kind of hibernating are you referring to? Since if its on RAM I can imagine possible data loss when the power is cut.
Oh, I thought hibernation is always understood as suspend to disk and sleep as suspend to ram.
Probably something funky on my end but my CachyOS machine struggles to wake up from sleep mode. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it takes 5+ minutes on a black screen, sometimes it just never comes on. Regardless, I use an elgato stream deck (I like my funny buttons + dials and it powers my XLR mic), and it flat out doesn’t turn back on after sleep.
This thing is up and running in like a minute tops from a cold boot anyway so I usually just run an update and full shut down every night.
For me, I expanded my swapfile from 2GB to 16GB. I usually face wake issues every 2-3 days, but now I’m officially on my first week without issues.
I’ve had the weird black screen on wake issue on Cachy due to problems with nvidia daemon not behaving itself. If you have an nvidia card you might look into that. Recent updates have mitigated the issue a bit for me. Sometimes when it does have the issue I’m able to swap to another TTY and then back and it will cause it to rethink it’s bad decisions and the login screen will be there.
Oh yeah, it’s probably an Nvidia thing isn’t it. Yeah sometimes swapping works, though overall it’s just not consistent enough to bother with sleep.
If you’re specifically asking because of memory use, there is no need. Memory management in Linux is extremely efficient, and since everything is a process, a properly killed process doesn’t block reclaim of that memory as you see a lot in Windows. You may see your “free” memory as being low, but that’s kind of a misnomer as you should be paying attention to claimed vs unclaimed/cached memory, which will be “recycled” into other processes that request it. If you run into memory issues on Linux or BSD, you’ll know it.
That being said, if your machine isn’t suspending or cleeping, then you’re just wearing your components out by leaving them on 24/7, so shutting down or suspending would be good practice to extend the general lifespan of your machine.
I always turn off my pc, it takes maybe as much time to boot as it does for me to walk from the power button to the sofa (it’s a living room setup and those 2 things are a metre apart)
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 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 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.
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 come from the HDD era. This means booting an OS from an SSD feels like instant to me. I shut down my PC when I was using Windows, I shut it down using Linux. Also I shut it down when I am not using it. And it really doesn’t matter if I played games or not, I don’t really understand the connection between these two things.
For my gaming PC, I shut it down whenever I’m not actively using it.
My laptop is usually just put to sleep, and only fully powered off if I don’t plan to use it for a bit, or if I’m installing updates.
My servers stay on 24/7.
I can’t even get sleep to work on my computer for whatever reason.
While I’m not a gamer, I’m a Linux user from kernel version 0.97.
I shut my system down for hardware changes, when the electrician is working, and when I go on holidays. I reboot after kernel updates.
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).
