Comment by gonzalohm
7 days ago
I don't have any data to prove it but I think Mac users don't bother "cleaning up" after they are done with their computers.
I think windows and Linux users usually shut down their laptops when they are done.
I believe this is because of how Mac is designed, nothing really closes. You close an app and it's just "minimized". Same behavior as with the lid, you close the lid and it suspends.
If I recall correctly, at some point, this also affected the iPhone, you were not able to "fully close" apps and they decided to add a screen so you could swipe and "close" the app (some run in the background, same as android)
I think your model of open/closed is incomplete and thus misleading. There are more states to a process than "active" and "inactive," and it is not optimal for the system to simply move processes between those two gross states. The obvious example is non-foreground apps during multitasking. A less obvious example is an app during a background refresh.
"Fully closing" a process is not necessarily cleaner than letting the system allocate intelligently, despite what one's puritanical upbringing might make them believe. (Consider how artists often need a messy space to optimally hold their processes.)
I think my point is that minimizing the process doesn't free the ram it's using. Closing it, even if it stays running in the background, should free up resources
That's what swap is for.
> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed
Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.
I still remember reaching into my backpack to retrieve my Macbook in sleep mode only to find it hot to the touch, having woken up for some goddamn stupid reason. We had "proper" sleep decades ago: we called it "hibernate". Modern "smart sleep" is a technological regression, and Apple is as big an offender as any.
Sure. Do you shut off your phone every time you put it in your pocket?
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What's the point of sleeping your computer? If you are not using it then it's better to just turn it off
So I don't have to spend 10-15 minutes saving all my open files (including the scratchpad ones I haven't named) and then later reopening all my applications, recreating all of my tmux windows and panes, setting up my vim splits and tabs again, and starting all of my stopped Docker containers?
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It takes ages to cold boot. My desktop is ok-ish, but it doens't matter since I only use it occasionally.
My old HP laptop had a slow-ass BIOS that I was convinced had some kind of bug. I replaced it with a brand spanking new thinkpad 2-3 months ago. Guess what? The freaking BIOS is EVEN SLOWER somehow!
They all wake up instantly from sleep.
I therefore only shut them down when I know they'll be unplugged for a while, because for some reason the HP eats through the battery even when off. If suspended, the battery will be out of juice in like two days. Haven't tried any of this with the Lenovo yet.
Suspend used to work great, but since MS figured they should copy Apple half-assedly, suspend is borken. And I have really no idea what we've gained in exchange.
Now that I have an nvme SSD in all my computers and boot times are roughly 10-15 seconds or so unless something has gone wrong, the advantage of sleeping is somewhat mitigated.
Back in the spinning rust era, though, a good unsuspend could be something like 50 times faster to get to a running computer. Possibly more, depending on what your OS needed to start up.
It is still more convenient to have my previous environment most of the time, and still faster to unsuspend than boot, but it isn't as much of an advantage as it used to be, no.
On Windows and Linux it is better to just turn it off because sleep is broken on most hardware. But on Mac there is next to no advantage to doing that. MacOS sleep is also more of a hybrid between sleep and hibernate where it will after enough time offload the ram to the SSD and fully power down so the machine can be in "sleep" without any power drain.
If you turn it off, it might attempt a 45 minute update when you start it again (yes this has happened to me with macos).
The same reason that you don't do a full shutdown every time you walk away from your computer. I don't really believe that you don't understand this.
I think what you're talking about is how on Mac, an application can stay running without having any windows. Separate from closing all the windows, you usually have to "Quit" the application if you really want it gone. This is useful for a couple reasons:
- You can "Quit" the application without closing all the windows, and then the next time you start the application, your windows can come back.
- You can close all the windows without "Quit"ting the application, and you don't have to wait for the application to load again in order to open a window later.
Additionally, since application lifecycle is managed separately from the open windows, apps can do cool things like saving and restoring the set of open windows through a system restart. Which Windows and Linux still haven't managed. (Maybe Windows can try to restart the processes... I think I saw that becoming an option more recently)
I've never rebooted often in general, even when I daily-drove Windows. Then, it was because it was annoying to get my preferred workspace back after a Windows restart. Now, I daily-drive macOS and I don't often reboot until the machine gets slow/janky because the machine doesn't really need a reboot until then. And I don't hate reboots as much as I would for Windows because macOS is a lot better at session restoration
I think a large part is also how long it takes to restart a Mac. Every so often a coworker has to restart and I could probably restart my Linux (or even Windows) laptop 3 times before they're back on.
Kind of reminds me of how slow Windows computers used to boot back in the Vista and 7 era.
I'd argue the opposite. My mac wakes up from sleep when I open the lid, and is functional in seconds with the fingerprint. Meanwhile sleep on windows is a complete dumpster truck and can result in any of "works fine", "a bunch of apps have got stuck" or "your battery drained in your backpack".
Also, my Win11 desktop is "fast" to get from POST (which takes > 2 minutes to do RAM check on every boot with 192GB RAM) to the login screen, but it's a good few minutes from log in before windows has started all the background stuff and it's actually functional.
Are they MDM'd? If so that's the MDM's fault, not the OS.
What’s crazy is that boot time was a headline feature of Snow Leopard.
Wat? The apple silicon one on my desk restarts in under 30 seconds. Markedly faster than the Windows PC next to it
I'm glad it works for you, but I have witnessed several coworkers restart their macbooks (some M1, some M2, possibly M3) and I don't think I've ever seen a reboot shorter than about two minutes.
At one instance, I rolled over to a coworker who has just rebooted theirs and had a whole 5+ minute conversation.
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I don't know what current Windows 11 does, but my typical Linux Mint is single-digit seconds, and my t490 is 7 years old already. Windows 10 is a bit slower but still single second territory. With more current hardware we are talking about 2 seconds plus whatever BIOS needs, see sibling comments. Maybe you have corporate AV on the Windows PC, or funny drivers?
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That is not true, when you close apps on macOS the process(es) really are finished, just like on Windows or Linux.
I think they think of "closing an app" as closing its windows, which on Mac does not always "Quit" the app.
Right, I see. That is the traditional behaviour but there’s lots of apps that don’t do that, and closing the last window does also quit the app.
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On linux a lot of the time you kinda have to shut down because it either won't go to sleep ("failed to freeze" some process or another) or it will hang or lock up during/after wake - especially if it has nvidia with its binary blobs, but i've had problems with (in kernel, open source) network card drivers too. Since I first had problems like this with linux 2 decades ago, it seems like they will never be able to figure it out.
Some of this seems to be getting worse with the move to wayland. There is no design concept like windows D3D device reset or lost device, or display timeout/recovery, so drivers are apparently charged with perfectly remembering all the state that compositors create, through all the sleep states, with predictably bad results.
I have only ever had one sleep over multiple Linux laptops over nearly 20 years, my own and other people's, including some tricky hardware (an MS surface). I only ever use sleep/suspend to RAM though. I avoid Nvidia though.
I reboot every few months. Usually because of an update. Very occasionally because something gets a bit buggy. Mostly I just close my laptop or lock the screen when I walk away. It's not worth my time rebooting and then having to reopen stuff to get back to where I was a few minutes ago. Doesn't get me anything I need.
Linux users do not clean up AFAIK, and the article is by a Mac user who does clean up. Why would Linux and Windows users not use sleep? AFAIK everyone does.
I avoid sleep on my desktop because it often wakes up in a weird broken state, particularly with audio glitching. I avoid sleep on my Steamdeck because the battery slowly drains in sleep.
On my Macbook I always use sleep since there are no downsides.
I never shut off my Windows laptop. Just close it. Once a month or so when there's a major update it gets rebooted.
my every day use macbook I expect 150+ days uptime before something goes wonky that forces a reboot
I used to be in this camp, maybe not 150+ days but with month+ uptimes, but now with Docker I have to restart regularly as I frequently get notes about 'no more disk space' and the only way to reclaim is is to reboot.
As a Linux user, it pisses me off whenever I am forced to reboot, and I'm very disappointed if my laptop uptime is measured in less than months.
Needing to shut down to me indicates something is broken.
What can possibly require a laptop to be up for months?
I have a Linux server that can run for years without needing a reboot. But my laptop I just shut it down after my work is done
Not having to stop sessions of all kinds of things and restart them for no good reason.
It doesn't require it to stay up, and if things were better at retaining state across restarts I would care less, but it's a nuisance to have to log back into things, and get things back exactly how I left them.
I often have half a dozen projects up on different virtual desktops, and leaving them how they were when I worked on it last makes it easier to get back up to speed.
EDIT: I used to leave screen sessions running on servers instead, as the workaround to having to reboot my local machine. But it's nice not to need to.
Nothing requires it. But if I turn off my computer, it takes 15s or so to boot up. If I leave it on, it's available for me instantly. The latter is a more pleasant experience, so I gravitate towards it.
Different reasons. Mine is on the table and I use it more like a desktop. It will just idle when I'm not around, because I come and go often. My current uptime shows on Debian 30 days, 49 min.
Although... 30 days is maybe a bit misleading, because I ran some heavy shaders without thinking that triggered the GPU watchdog and forced me out of my session. I think killing all user processes is almost like a reboot, although not according to uptime.
What can possibly require a laptop to be shut down instead of put to sleep?
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Keeping a PC running when you aren't doing anything with it sounds like a waste of electricity to me.
Electricity also wears down electronic components, so I think it also shortens the lifespan of your PC parts.
I can't remember the last time I got a new PC because the old one broke, vs. because I wanted one that was better.
As for being wasteful, sure, but it adds up to an insignificant rounding error of my total energy use so it's not something I lose any sleep over.
Reboot wears down electronic components too.
How much power is consumed when suspended?
My 15 year old kid annoys me because he will do a full shut down just to go eat his dinner. I'm like "just let it sleep" and he's like "No!"