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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.


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.


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.


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).




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