I use Ubuntu btw. 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
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 power off so that my drive encrypts when I’m not using it
Yeah I am a bit paranoic sometimes about it too
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.
🤷
Yeah, because of the same experience for the last 2 decades, I always shut my stuff down as well.
Then I gave an old laptop with Linux to my
neoprenenephew. And without further discussion or thinking, he just pressed the power button, when he wanted it to be off - which triggered some kind of sleep mode
I was so fucking nervous during that, as I had never tested for that, and for the young generation growing up with smartphones that was the obvious move.
But surprisingly it works like a charm and goes into some kind of standby.
At least I didn’t got any complains…Isn’t neoprene a synthetic material?
My husband also uses the power button to power off his PC. I didn’t even know it was a thing until he asked me to do it for him at some point and I was very confused. He’s on Windows. I didn’t know this worked on Linux as well (though I know it’s a thing on laptops). Is there a way to configure what it does (on PC) like it does on laptops?
Ah, fucking auto correct
Should have read: my nephew ;-)
Edit: and regarding your question:
Yeah, there some power management tools/deamons to configure in Linux, how to handle what.
Depends a bit on your distribution/environment, which tools are available - or make sense to be installedHaha, to be honest it took me a bit to figure out you might have meant nephew. XD I must admit I even looked it up to see if there was a different meaning to the word that I didn’t know about. :'-)
Thanks for the tips. I do vaguely remember seeing a setting somewhere but I think I’ll need to look into it more when I’m more awake (it’s past midnight here).
IIRC in the UEFI (aka BIOS), there’s usually a setting to dictate what a tap of the power button does—usually sleep, hibernate, or power off.
Try tapping F10, F12, or Del during early startup to get into the UEFI setup
Thanks for the tips! I’ll have a look!
I was trained to turn off PCs completely from a young age so still do this, necessary or not
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-hibernatein /etc/systemd/logind.conf, andHibernateDelaySec=300in /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.
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.
Hibernation is, in fact fully powered off.
Oh right, I confuse the two
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.
Else it gets the cord again
I’ve had to start counseling sessions with my MongoDB. It thinks I’m conducting stress tests, but really I’m just maintaining discipline.
I know a real professional when I see one!
Yeah! Show them who’s boss.
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.
Not to mention the steam deck has a weird bug on it that if you leave it powered off for too long, for some reason it decides to just not turn on anymore unless you hook it to power. Super annoying because it will turn on and say something like 80 or 90% power, but the button won’t actually boot the system unless it has a power hookup. I’ve on a few occasions had to use reverse power charge from my phone to the deck to trick it into booting on the go. Once you hear the beep saying its turning on you can unplug it. Weirdest thing
I think that has something to do with battery storage mode flipping on iirc.
You guys are turning off your computers?
That was my reaction, to the question, too.
I’m not sure what power down options my current (Linux) OS has. I just let the battery die sometimes like a normal person.
Edit: The battery management defaults are so good, I have to forget about it on a shelf for several days before it - well I don’t know what it does, because I’m ingoring it. Maybe it powers down, maybe it suspends, maybe it does some kind of emergency shut down…
My laptop, I’d just suspend to RAM, unless I was going somewhere without it for a couple of days or more.
The desktop is always on. The monitors suspend, but everything else is sucking power. I expect with frequency scaling, it’s not as bad as it used to be, but then, in ye oelden days I didn’t do nightly backups to the cloud and disc, or sync data between servers and run other odd, automated jobs.
I am trying to be more energy conscious so I’ve been turning mine off more as of late, but ya in the past I typically left my machine up for 7 - 14 days and only power off/reboot after updating.
I remember older gaming forums where people would have their uptime in their post signatures.
Edit to add: upon reflection it was all the more impressive because almost all gaming PCs were Windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bugs
Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows 98 had a problem with rollovers in a virtual device driver, VTDAPI.VXD, which used unsigned 32-bit integers to measure system runtime in milliseconds; this value would overflow after 49.7 days, causing systems to freeze.[93]
The horrifying thing here isn’t just the bug, but that this made it into two major releases of Windows because the system was sufficiently-unstable that it wasn’t tracked down for years.
One area where desktop computers have come a very long way in the past 30 years is in OS stability.
Yep, that’s the right timeframe I was referring to.
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.
Even without considering any firehazard I simply enjoy starting from a clean slate every time I start a pc.
Yeah that as well. Same with my browser. I tend to configure my browser such that it clears all open tabs when closed.
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 hibernate for exactly that reason. Just have to ensure your swap partition is inside your crypto container.
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.
Maybe there’s not a huge difference, but the power usage of suspending is definitely lower, since only the RAM is getting power. CPU and disks have some idle power consumption, and you can have some background processes that wouldn’t be executed while suspended.
This assumes you have a machine which supports proper S3 sleep, which newer devices increasingly do not :(
A lot of modern laptops only support S0 “modern standby”, which basically means the kernel puts all processes including itself on pause, but the CPU and all other components are still powered despite being idle.
Depends on what you run on your system, but when my system idles my cpu is at literal 0%, ram at 600mb and disk usage is 0% (nvme), which ends up my total power usage to about 3W on idle or something like.
It’s a laptop so doesn’t use a lot.
Power off to get the full security benefits of disk encryption.
