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.
Uhhh yeah. My PC is booted in less than half a minute, why would I let it waste energy the whole night just to boot slightly faster? Even when I booted off of an HDD I still did so.
Sounds crazy to me that people aren’t shutting down their computers when not using them. For me it’s like turning off the light off in a room you’re leaving. I can still hear the voice of my mum giving me a lecture about not wasting energy and I’m thankful for this.
It’s such a small gesture and it can already improve your carbon footprint a tiny bit.
The only exception is when I’m downloading a game or backing up my computer.
All the time. When I’m not using my PC it’s off. Why would I keep it on, it boots up in seconds.
For me the advantage of keeping it in sleep is having all the apps open and exactly where I left them. “Session save” type features never keep things quite right - some apps just don’t reopen, they’re often not on the right workspace etc, not to mention documents and so on have to be saved if you power off.
You can of course use hibernation to get the best of both worlds, at the cost of long start-up times, and so I do often do that, when I’m not expecting to turn back for a while.
Personally I prefer to always start off from scratch where I can. If I need to go away from the computer and things are in a fragile state or where the setup is finicky and I’ll be finishing it next session then I’ll just put it to sleep.
Every time I’m done with it. Same for work. Even for laptops.
The only gaming device I can put to sleep for a longer period of time without feeling weird about it is my Steam Deck, and even in such cases it either means I’ll be back in minutes (essentially putting a game on standby) or a few hours tops.
I’m old. For me, a PC is like a TV or radio. When I’m done using it, I turn it off.
Which means saving my work and shutting it down. I don’t put it to sleep or standby. And I set my session manager to start a new session every time.
People who keep unsaved documents and hundreds of browser tabs open are weird. Use bookmarks!well, i keep tons of tabs open AND use a lot of bookmarks
So, 2 old people here, and counting. I finish my day with ‘paru - Syu’ and followed by 'poweroff" almost every day. The only exception is if I move away from my PC and then decide I’m just not going back that day.
i shutdown my pc every time i stop using it. i didnt know there are ppl out there that dont
Uhhh yeah. My PC is booted in less than half a minute, why would I let it waste energy the whole night just to boot slightly faster? Even when I booted off of an HDD I still did so.
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).
Yes I always shutdown my laptop/desktop. They boot so quickly I see no need to use sleep. The only time I use sleep is when I’m streaming with Sunshine but half the time WOL doesn’t work anyway. 🤷♂️
My Windows work laptop on the other hand…
I can fly to Costa Rica, get some coffee beans, fly back home, grind those beans, make a fresh espresso, and then maybe it will have finished booting from shutdown.
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 only shut down if nobody’s home for longer than a day. 99.9% it just autosuspends so it can be woken up from lan because it also has jellyfin server
My Bazzite PC lives in a cabinet under my living room TV, next to my PS5.
I put it to sleep when not in use, so I can wake it with my 8bitdo controller.
It’s basically a second gaming console.
I didn’t change my GRUB menu not to see it.
Uhhh yeah. My PC is booted in less than half a minute, why would I let it waste energy the whole night just to boot slightly faster? Even when I booted off of an HDD I still did so.
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.
