Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

Power off because it boots in under a minute

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 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.

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

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.

🤷

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.

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.

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

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.

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

or however long it takes to drain whatever battery is left while suspended

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.

Also, lithium batteries left in very low charge states will permanently lose capacity, and while there's a buffer built in there (i.e. 0% on your battery gauge doesn't mean that the thing is discharged to 0 volts), they'll also inexorably self-discharge a bit, and I'd just as soon keep them well away from that state. I've had devices, including laptops, that have a few minutes of battery life or won't work at all after having been left in a drawer for years.

y'all been powering down your systems?

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

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

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

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 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 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, since my computers boots pretty quickly.

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.

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

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

Power off. I never used hibernation nor suspend (even on Windows) and as I don't use some of my computers for weeks, it just doesn't make sense to keep them suspended for so long. And now that I'm on Fedora Atomic Desktop with auto-updates, I would have to reboot regularly anyway in order to apply updates.

Only exception is the Steam Deck for which I kept suspend so I can pick up my games where I left off.

I'm lazy and use systemctl poweroff! 😆