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.
If it’s not a server then it’s getting turned off when I’m not using it
I grew up in the era of. PCs take forever to boot and sleep is good enough that when I turn it back on it’s still alive.
Laptop Sleep, desktop depends on when I use it last.
I am of the old school mindset that stress cycles kill components. So, much like the centennial light, I don’t turn off pc’s ever. As a result I’ve only ever had one hard component failure (not including HDDs) over 31 years. Less energy efficient? Absolutely! But I’ll trade that for component life even if it’s a placebo.
Always. When I’m not using my PC it’s turned off. I only turn it on when I’m using it, and then turn it off when I’m done. Yes, this includes things like going onto short shopping trips.
The only times I’ve let my PC on when I’m not directly using it is when it’s rendering something.
Never turn my PC off, regardless of OS. (Edit. under normal day to day operation. I only technically turn my PC off and unplug it on the rare occasions where I have to travel and be away from home for more than a couple days, and I turn off and unplug most my expensive electronics when I do so, partly as fire prevention partly to just protect them)
Introduces to much thermal and electrical stress for my taste, and most assuredly shortens life span of the system/components from my personal experience.
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I’ll be the odd one out, as a relatively new Linux gamer. I almost never shut it down unless I want OS updates. Weeks without an intentional shutdown usually.
I treat it more like a phone than I do a TV or radio like I saw other people mentioning. Always on, as I left it, running whatever it was running. Screen turns off after 30 minutes of course.
I don’t pay for power, so that’s not really a concern for me, and I use it frequently enough when home that most of my time involves the desktop in some way.
People used to leave their PCs running 24/7 due to the fear of thermal expansion causing hard drive failure. It’s not a problem anymore as far as I know, but this practice stuck with a lot of old power users.
It wasn’t quite as silly when PCs didn’t draw so much power.
The sleep functionality has historically been unreliable at best so that gets avoided as well.
Now, in 2026, even if I’m just going outside for 20 minutes I’ll sleep the machine, unless it’s doing something in particular.
Laptop? Whenever I ain’t using it.
Steam Deck? Same.
I don’t want the battery on either to go to hell in a hand basket.
Desktop? I usually keep it in sleep and every once in a while turn it offnto give it a full rest. Sleep manages to keep it cool enough and uses minimal power, so I don’t have as huge if a problem with that.
Probably should turn it off more often, though.
If I’m leaving for more than 24 hours -> off
After any update where the distro equivalent of
needrestartsays something is using an old binary, I just reboot instead of restarting individual servicesI 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!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.
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
