I always shut down my PC. No need to keep it wasting electricity (even a little) when I'm away and I can wait a bit for it to boot again

Every day when I go to bed

If I'm leaving for more than 24 hours -> off

After any update where the distro equivalent of needrestart says something is using an old binary, I just reboot instead of restarting individual services

I see no point in keeping my power hungry monster awake 24/7. I'm in any game less than 3 minutes after a cold boot.

If you mean by "should", because you fear losing performance, like Windows, then no. But I also see no point in keeping it on 24/7. When I'm done with my computer, I just turn it off. If I want to play a video game, the absolute maximum amount of time it takes for me is 120 seconds until I'm in a game from cold start. Constantly feeding my power-hungry monster just isn't worth it.

People used to leave their PCs running 24/7 due to the fear of thermal expansion causing hard drive failure. It's not a problem anymore as far as I know, but this practice stuck with a lot of old power users.

It wasn't quite as silly when PCs didn't draw so much power.

The sleep functionality has historically been unreliable at best so that gets avoided as well.

Now, in 2026, even if I'm just going outside for 20 minutes I'll sleep the machine, unless it's doing something in particular.

No.

o5@TR5:~$ uptime
 19:59:08 up 55 days,  4:28,  4 users,  load average: 0.72, 0.72, 0.84

Laptop? Whenever I ain't using it.

Steam Deck? Same.

I don't want the battery on either to go to hell in a hand basket.

Desktop? I usually keep it in sleep and every once in a while turn it offnto give it a full rest. Sleep manages to keep it cool enough and uses minimal power, so I don't have as huge if a problem with that.

Probably should turn it off more often, though.

All the time. When I'm not using my PC it's off. Why would I keep it on, it boots up in seconds.

Energy ain't free, the additional lights fuck sleep schedule, blackouts may happen, the computer produces heat which wears its own pieces, chances are it will be kept online meaning greater risk of being hacked, computer on means more read-write operations which wear the memory down as Nutin said, and so on.

At most, maybe it'd be justifiable if it's downloading/running something which can't be stopped. Or another possibility though not a justification, the person isn't responsible towards his/her machine. Otherwise, I struggle to think of reasons not to turn it off.

My gaming box is only booted and powered on when I use it, my server is up 24/7.

I run fedora atomic which needs to reboot for updates. I usually update and shutdown every night, so i get the updates running the next day when i start the computer.

I prefer shutting it down over sleep, because theres always some shit that doesn't work after wakeup

I find sleep is still a bit quirky on Linux. Every once an a while it’ll get stuck in sleep mode and I can’t bring it back to life - forcing a hard reset via pulling the power.

So I just shut it down. I wouldn’t have an issue just always shutting down, but ddr5 memory training is annoying and I wish it didn’t behave so slow on startup.

Every day before I go to work. For 10 hours at least.

I put my machine to sleep usually. Only reboot/shutdown for rare cases, rearranging my office, that sort of thing.

Every few weeks when I run a full system update. Otherwise, only when Teams fucks up and I'm out of other ideas to try. It usually doesn't fix it. (And when it does, it's probably just arbitrary anyway.)

Oh, wait. You said shut down. lol, no.

Actually, I guess when my local energy company runs a power saving event.

Hibernation is underrated. If you don't want to risk losing stuff you have open but want 0 energy draw, hibernation is great. As a bonus, you can store your swap file in an encrypted partition to prevent attacks possible with normal sleep mode.

I have my sleep option set to automatically switch to hibernation if it's been asleep for 3 hours.

I shutdown my Desktop daily, sometimes more if for example I'm playing in the morning and going out for lunch and coming back in the evening and playing again. In short if I'm going to spend over an hour not using it I'll power it off, no reason to keep it on and honestly it powers on almost as fast as coming back from hibernation so why bother? That made sense before SSDs, but nowadays I don't see much reason.

There's one big exception, and that is sleeping in the middle of a game, to be able to be back in the game in seconds. It's one of my favorite features of the Steam Deck, but I haven't tried it on my desktop because I usually use it for other stuff too so it's not as useful there.

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.

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!

I do because bazzite consistently kernel panics for me roughly every third wake-from-sleep with nothing in the logs.

Probably something funky on my end but my CachyOS machine struggles to wake up from sleep mode. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it takes 5+ minutes on a black screen, sometimes it just never comes on. Regardless, I use an elgato stream deck (I like my funny buttons + dials and it powers my XLR mic), and it flat out doesn't turn back on after sleep.

This thing is up and running in like a minute tops from a cold boot anyway so I usually just run an update and full shut down every night.