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Comment by jorgesborges | Hacker News Reader

Serious question — why do people so frequently sleep rather than shut down? Is it to save time on booting up? Is it because you want other processes running? All of the pain points below are reasons why I just always shut down. I think I developed the habit at a time when sleep just never worked on my linux machine though, but that was years ago now. I’m speechless reading below that Windows wakes just to install updates… and then remains awake!

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> Serious question — why do people so frequently sleep rather than shut down?

So we can right back in the context we had? Who wants to spend the first 15 minutes digging out Jira, the issue you worked on, the two related ones, start IntelliJ, digging out the correct screenshots etc etc.

... or even: who wants to stop debugging and turn of the computer just because we are leaving the office to catch the train?

I first learned this on a 486/66 DX2 IBM aptiva desktop in 1995.

I've too had times when it didn't work on Linux but today boil-in-bag seems to be a Windows feature, not supported out of the box on ordinary Linux distros on mainstream hardware ;-)

I prefer to put my computer to sleep rather than shut it down. Closing the lid on my computer, putting it in my backpack, and heading home for the day is very natural. When I get back to work the next day, I open it up connect the cables, scan my fingerprint, and everything's back where I left it. I usually go at least a month between reboots, but that's highly dependant on when updates come out (and get approved by work, of course).

This is on a Mac though, so (for me anyway) this is something that just works without any fuss.

As a slight aside, I prefer to shut down and be sure that things are shut down. It really bothered me when Mac laptops started turning on just because the lid was open.

It makes it impossible to confirm the laptop is truly off, because opening it to check turns it on. This was especially annoying during my "boarding a plane" ritual where I check everything is right before settling in.

> started turning on just because the lid was open.

Fridges have this problem too, but if you’re taking one of them on a plane it’s your own fault.

And on a Mac it works either way, as you will get almost all of your context back even if you shut down rather than sleep. Windows still seems to start up as a blank slate, unless I’m missing a setting somewhere.

These days, Windows will try to recover your context, but the implementation (like many other modern features like display scaling) is dependent on the app. As far as I've been able to tell, roughly most Microsoft and Electron apps will recover their states on reboot; most other apps won't.

I have literally never had macOS' restore session feature work correctly. It's so bad that I just decline it.

It will try to start up the applications I least care about; meanwhile ignoring the actual context I desire, which just slows me down more.

Like a sibling commenter, I've found this pretty hit-and-miss too.

Something like Outlook or OneNote will restore its state reasonably well, as will Safari/Chrome/Edge/Firefox. Others, like Activity Monitor, Enpass, and iTerm2, decide to "helpfully" open a window for me even though the previous state was "running with no windows open" (which is perfectly valid for many applications).

People who use Macs have been just closing and opening their computers for about a decade and not thinking about it.

The wifi is still connected, the ssh session I was in is still connected... The tests I was running when the doorbell rang... they pick up where they left off. It's nice.

It's stuff like this that keeps me begrudgingly coming back to Apple for laptops.

> People who use Macs have been just closing and opening their computers for about a decade and not thinking about it.

Yes and no. There have been weird issues where the machine wakes but the screen stays dark and another where externally connected monitors won’t necessarily work on wake. Possibly some of this is connected fo the hell which is the dongle lifestyle.

Apple seems to have come out the other side of these issues with recent laptops/OS releases (last 18 months).

I did this with my year 2000 Windows laptop ... just shows Apple is 20 years behind on modern technology.

Hibernate is the best option by far but they seem to want to push away from it.

Yes. I agree. It seems to be getting harder to set up hibernate as an option. Regular (non HN) users might not even figure out that hibernate is a possibility. But it definitely is a better option than sleep.

> But it definitely is a better option than sleep.

It's the better option if you don't mind the longer time waking up, since RAM has to be restored from disk.

Otherwise, sleep should be backed by hibernation on all machines (it certainly is on mac laptops, and I think it is on windows as well): in case of power loss during sleep, the machine falls back to waking from hibernation, but if there was no power loss it wakes way faster. This is especially useful for people who move around a lot during the day and will close the laptop, move around, and reopen it. While things have gotten better with modern SSDs, having to restore 16 to 32GB from disk to RAM is far from instant-on.

Sure, but it definitely avoids a bunch of the problems mentioned in this thread. It's annoying that you have to dig so hard to even make Hibernate visible next to Sleep, Shutdown, and Reboot on the various power menus.

I recently switched from an XPS 15 to an M1 MacBook Pro, and it's glorious that I just don't have to think about it anymore. The XPS 15 had all the problems I'm reading above, and then some.

Macs do this. They hibernate to RAM and after about 1 hour (configurable with pmset I think) they wake up momentarily to hibernate to SSD.

The reason they don't write the hibernate image straight away and just power down after an hour is to eliminate writes to the SSD but I believe you can set that wait to 0.

I don’t choose to sleep or shutdown. I want instant context saving and I will close my laptop many times a day. I expect opening it to restore me to where I was within 5 seconds with same application state and windows in the same place.

I have a MacBook which performs this flawlessly and my Linux desktop also pauses and restores flawlessly except immediately after installing new Nvidia GPU drivers.

I haven’t thought about different CPU sleep stages in approximately 9 years when I had to make my XPS M1330 handle them in the end years of its life.

> I think I developed the habit at a time when sleep just never worked on my linux machine though

I did the same in my ~15 years of Windows & Linux desktops and laptops, with the sole exception of an IBM (yep, was still IBM) Thinkpad on which suspend to disk would magically Just Work on Linux if you created a partition at the correct location, with the correct size, and with the correct type ID. The BIOS handled it somehow, I think, which seems crazy but it did work flawlessly. IIRC I didn't even have to tell Linux about it, and I ran Gentoo at the time so I doubt it was doing anything for me automatically.

Switching to Mac a little over a decade ago broke me of the habit, eventually. It was one of many coping behaviors I didn't need anymore and had to un-learn. Unfortunately, now that I'm used to shit actually working semi-correctly a fair amount of the time (to be clear, Mac is far from perfect, everything else is just so much worse that it's like no-one else is even trying) without my having to spend time forcing it to work, it's hard to go back.

Primary reason: I need to type a 16-character bitclocker password and then a 16-character Windows password after shutdown. But with all those sleep and overheating issues that's what I do now.

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