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 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 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 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’m using an arch based distro so I get kernel and driver updates pretty frequently that need a reboot to load. There is some weird thing I haven’t found a fix for yet, where sometimes a warm reboot forgets half my RAM (likely something to do with MCR)… but a cold start works fine. So I shutdown and restart and all is well. Once a week maybe?
My PC is either on (when I am actively sitting in front of it working) or off (all other times). With a cool down, of course, for coffee breaks or a quick lunch.
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)
My computer loads up in 5 sec or less. And power bills are too much to be running all the time. Even sleep with devices plugged in takes power.
I shut it down when I am not suing it. Every time.
Suing your computer sounds like a lot, but you do you.
lol woops. Well thats how you know AI didnt write my stuff, spelling errors. ill keep it.
Cant sue it if it is off
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.
I shutdown every night because there’s a bug where it won’t wake up from sleep like 70% of the time. Easier to just shutdown than gamble and get annoyed.
It cold boots in like 20 seconds if there were no updates, so not a huge deal.
I’m reading through this thread and I’m surprised that there are actually quite a few of us who have trouble waking up their PCs.
I may have solved mine by increasing my swapfile from 2GB to 16GB. So far it hasn’t been an issue for me for an entire week. It usually kicks in every 2-3 days.
Power is way too expensive for me not shut down my workstation and gaming pc. I have one lower foot print home server that runs continuously tho
You’ll also need to cut the power to power supplies if you want to save every watt. For example, my desktop computer (display et al. not included) takes 2.2 W sleeping, and 1.7 W powered off.
With 10 cents per kilowatt, 2.2 W costs 0.00022 whole units of money per hour. 10 hours of sleep would come to cost 0.803 whole units of money per year.
Formula: 2.2 W * (0.1 M/kWh / 1000) * 10 h * 365, where M is some currency of money.
I agree with you. I always take sensible steps to minimise my energy consumption, but even at current sky-high electricity prices, some things simply are not worth worrying about. Putting TV in standby is one for instance. When my parents moved house, my dad paid an electrician £200 to have a switched power socket installed by the TV, just so he could easily “turn it off at the wall”. Modern TVs use less than 0.5W when in standby, so it would be decades before the savings from this expense made up for the energy costs of manufacturing and installing a new power socket.
I shut my computer down whenever I intend to stop using it for more than a couple of hours. So that means every night, and some other times as well. Starting the computer doesn’t take very long. So I don’t feel like it is a hassle or trouble. Being completely shut down saves a bit of power; and there are other minor benefits.
One benefit is that it prevents accidentally waking the computer in the middle of the night, filling the room with light and noise while I fumble in a tired state trying to shut it down. (Not saying that happens often, but it has happened - and it is not nice.)
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).
I didn’t change my GRUB menu not to see it.
