Ask Lemmy

What is power...off?

Like back in the 90s??

Just chiming in to point out that powering off and then starting back up won't cause any additional SSD wear, reading from flash memory doesn't use up write cycles* (because there is no writing going on!). In fact, regularly restarting could be slightly more friendly for your SSD, because the /tmp directory, old log files, etc. get deleted on startup, freeing up the storage blocks used by the deleted files so that the SSD can use them for its internal wear balancing.

*technically, flash memory reads do very slightly degrade the data being read, but this effect is absolutely negligible compared to other forms of passive bit rot in flash memory and is basically irrelevant unless you're intentionally trying to corrupt data using reads (which won't happen because the flash controller will fix it before it becomes corrupt to the point of being illegible)

I poweroff. I have enough time to let it turn on and can save some energy. (Electricity is getting even more expensive)

y'all been powering down your systems?

had my servers up for like a decade or more...

Nearly always suspend. It just works for me and I've never had issues (Arch and Pop). I rarely, rarely have power outages so the end result is the same.

I could care less about the 5 cycles from 10.000.000 total cycles (dunno the actual number) at least for my desktop.
As for my proxmox server: 5% wearout

I use the hybrid: suspend to ram, then after 2 hours, automatically suspend to disk - in the final state it uses zero power. And, if you have encrypted your drive (you DO encrypt your drives, right?!) then you need to enter passphrase on resume from hibernate, so safer if device was nicked.

I power off so that my drive encrypts when I'm not using it

I'm lazy and use systemctl poweroff! 😆

I definitely shut down my systems from time to time just to make sure my network is configured correctly and shit doesn't go haywire because I'd rather have that happen than the power go out and everything comes crashing down

Suspend. The amount of power required to keep RAM alive is negligent.

Power off to get the full security benefits of disk encryption.

Power off because usually when I turn my laptop off, I'm going to be keeping it off for a long enough period of time that suspend would just not be worth the battery drain.

My work machine (Ubuntu) gets suspended at the end of the day during the week and shut down on Friday. It's a good balance between keeping my many programs running and ready and cleaning up regularly.

I always shut down my desktop pc (Arch, btw) as it takes just a few seconds to boot up.

My laptop (Arch) I shut down because suspend never worked.

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.

You guys are turning off your computers?

Power off unless I'll be using it again soon.

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.

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.

Power off because it boots in under a minute

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.

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.

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.

Power off, since my computers boots pretty quickly.

After shutting down anything in use, I use suspend set for a 35-minute delay. Most evenings I listen to bed-time audio. Ubuntu hasn't been terribly reliable, works about 2/3 of the time.

I power it off to save electricity

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.

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.

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.