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)

Wait, what? Why is OP using Edge on a Mac? To each their own, it just caught me as odd.

And, as Betteridge’s Corollary or whatever demands, the answer to the headline is “no”. Is this like ancient wisdom about batteries, you’ve got to run them to zero once in a while or they’ll get a “memory”? (Which, of course, hasn’t been true for, like, twenty years.)

can't be hacked if it's completely off

can't get struck by lightning or surges if the surge-strip is flipped off

fans and spinning drives have lifetime on motors

    uptime

Very rarely there's a published kernel fix leading to an exploit that could potentially affect my setup that requires rebooting, but that is exceedingly rare.

FWIW my desktop regularly reaches six months of uptime and I had a server at OVH which I kept just because I could that reached something silly like 3400 days of uptime (it just didn't reach 10 years). At some point (after maybe three years) the uptime was so cool I decided to just keep it and see how long it'd stay up (and, no, that one wasn't secure at all: kids, don't try this at home). When the fire at OVH took entire bays off, I wasn't affected so the thing kept cranking.

If we leave security concerns aside, OSes are really that stable now (unless we're talking about Microsoft products of course).

> Have You Restarted Your Computer This Week?

Now of course I've got something like 12 computers at home so it really depends which computer you're talking about. For example I've got a server with ECC memory that runs VMs and containers but... I only need it when I'm awake. So that one I typically turn off at night (for the energy consumption). I know, I know: desktop up and server down at night I must be doing something wrong right? But then it's my setup and I do what I want.

These days I like to turn my work Mac off at the end of the week just so I feel a literal sense of closure. It's not really the applications minimizing and running in the background; it's ME.

[1] https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

But today I had to power it off, I accidentally created a fork bomb changing a couple of scripts on OpenBSD.

It did not freeze the system but I could not create any more processes. shutdown(8) could not even run, so a hard power off :)

I do hibernate sometimes though, and that is pretty much the same final state power-wise as doing a shutdown (more so for my laptop as it does not keep keyboard/mouse powered in S4 and its the same with the hall effect sensor for the lid).

That being said, I hibernate at the end of my day. For some reason, merely closing my Dell laptop just isn't as smooth on reopen as my Mac. The startup is almost as long as a full reboot.