Ask Lemmy

Power off, since my computers boots pretty quickly.

I suspend it, until I get around to set up hybernation. I don't care about startup time. I care about all the windows being there exactly as I left them, without exception.

You guys are turning off your computers?

I always power off any computers that I won't be using anymore for the day. Be it desktops or laptops. My parents always taught me that leaving devices on (or even connected to power) when not using them was a fire hazard. Although I think it's a bit overblown, powering off anything I don't need has stuck as a habit and I see no reason to change it. With SSDs the startup time had become fast enough to make me stop caring. The wear and tear on the SSD is also not that big of an issue. My laptop and its SSD are from 2014 and have been subjected to the worst of my programming abilities, yet they still function fine.

No. Never let them see your next move.

Power off because it boots in under a minute

I rip the plug out of the wall without warning. Gotta keep your machines on their toes or they'll get too comfortable and start plotting against you.

I'm in the habit of powering off so that if my laptop is lost or stolen I will have the peace of mind of my data being in an encrypted state.

Depends.

My desktop gets powered off because I don't use it often and it sucks a lot of energy and is loud.

My Steam Deck gets suspended when I'm not using it because that's usually in the middle of a game and I don't want to hear the game sounds all the time or accidentally do something.

My laptop is running 24/7. At night I use it to listen to science videos to help me sleep. And in the day I watch stupid YouTube videos to help me cope with life.

With how fast boot times are nowadays? I shutdown nightly and save me the hassle of having to worry about some weird oddity occurring, usually it doesn't but every once and a blue moon plasma hangs on the lockscreen and I get greeted with either a broken desktop or a pitch black screen, both usually are easiest to resolve via rebooting anyway.

Always power off everything and anything i can eg , routers, TV,, switches, desktop PC etc

For my full desktop, I turn it off when I'm not using it. It basically exists to do heavy compute tasks. I basically do that a few times a week. There's no reason to leave it on if I'm not in the middle of a job. That would be true regardless of the O.S. I'm using on it.

My main computer, I suspend. Usually, I try to make sure that happens on purpose because Ubuntu has this impossible to troubleshoot behavior^1^ that seems to happen more often if it falls asleep on its own.

I would be more inclined to shut it down but I'm particular about my windows and it takes what feels like an hour to get everything just so after reboot. I can't deal with that every day. (Nor am I thrilled about how often Ubuntu LTS wants me to reboot for updates. My desktop needs Ubuntu Studio LTS but my main computer doesn't. When I get time and energy, I'm switching it to Mint so I can deal with someone else's obnoxious choices for a change without learning an entirely new distro.)

^1^ The behavior is not recovering video on wake. It does seem to be working but following the commands I have memorized to shut it down from inside a virtual terminal don't work. The only way to get it down is to hold the power button for "4 seconds" or pull the power plug.

Power-off.

The read-weakening has almost no effect, and I like a clean boot.

Also it cleans up memory, modern kernels are good, I'm used to old OS's that leaked memory like a sieve.

I close the lid and don't give a damn what happens.

Power off because I don't know when I'll be back. If I know I'm back in a few minutes or an hour? That shit stays on.

I use systemctl poweroff to power down my laptop at work since I'm not at the office thu–sun. My desktop PC at home never gets rest. 😔

If I'm putting it into a bag, I'll power it off. It (Debian Laptop) boots faster than my Android tablet anyway, and I worry about it overheating without airflow.

The rest of the time, I just lock it and leave it to make it's own power decisions. Whatever the defaults were, from install, they seem fine.

It boots so fast, I don't notice if it was suspended or a cold boot unless I happen to have an attentive moment to watch the boot sequence carefully.

I just keep my laptop on for weeks on end, until the kernel updates or something else that needs a restart, last 6 months I prob only turned it off 7 times.

And no, I don't really feel any effects cause it's linux which doesm't get clogged up like windows and power usage just idling is the same as just suspending.

Also personally don't use stuff like suspend or hibernate ever. Even have them completely disabled on my systems.

Note: I'm on nixos not ubuntu tho.

Power Off to secure that things get updated and resetting float integers in case they would go haywire

Poweroff could use more write cycles on the SSD because it has to read everything at startup, but suspend has to keep supplying power to the RAM

for this, I would say SSD is more valuable personally, so if that was my only reason, I'd suspend to RAM every time

My computer's generally doing stuff I have it set to do, so I don't suspend to RAM

Laptop gets turned off when going outside, also encrypted

Maybe cause I'm old but boot times are so quick if I need to move i just shutdown throw it in my backpack and go. I don't want it on in any fashion while in my bag and hibernating to disk means all my shell sessions and anything else disconnected anyhow.

I power it off to save electricity

To be honest the experience over multiple laptops and multiple Linux distributions with regards to suspend or hibernate has been absolutely terrible for me. I now set my browser to remember all my tabs and simply shut down my machine when I'm not issuing it. It starts up in 30 seconds or less which is maybe 15 seconds more than waking from suspend or hibernate and it's not likely to break or require complicated set up.

🤷

suspend has to keep supplying power to the RAM

When I close my laptop's lid, I have it set up to suspend for five minutes, then hibernate.

That lets me close the lid and move the laptop to somewhere nearby without using much battery power, but if it gets left closed for long, the thing will hibernate, so it won't drain the battery.

That's HandleLidSwitch=suspend-then-hibernate in /etc/systemd/logind.conf, and HibernateDelaySec=300 in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf.

Any other system just gets shut down.

EDIT: Note that I don't believe that this is necessary to avoid data-loss. I think that the default on Debian is to suspend, but there's another default to hibernate when the battery becomes extremely low, so either way, a laptop sitting on a shelf for a week should wind up hibernated. But with the defaults, it's going to have a laptop with critical battery next time you open it up, and with my settings, it'll have about as much charge as when you closed the thing.

I use suspend-then-hibernate on my laptop (arch). It has a Nvidia graphics card, so it gives problems sometimes, but it mostly works fine.

I set it up like that in case I disconnect the laptop, so it will hibernate before running out of battery; it will also hibernate after 16h of being suspended (to save power), but I usually turn it back on before that.

I like suspending because my laptop has an HDD, and it is way faster to turn it back on this way.

I'm using suspend on my desktop running Manjaro KDE. To reduce power usage it goes to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity and wakes up on mouse or keyboard input. Aside from some flaky kernel versions and after underclocking an unstable EXPO profile it's pretty stable, even games continue to run after wakeup.