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.

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

No.

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

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

Every day when I go to bed

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

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.

I shutdown my computer whenever I’m done using it.

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.

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

I only do system upgrades every so often, normally based off hearing some new feature in a program I want. When I do, that usually includes a kernel update and it asks me to restart.

yep, its how it updates to the latest container image.

i usually restart pretty often bc I like to keep it updated

I'm also a adept of Sleep, I only shutdown when I know I'll be out of home for a extended period of time or when it randomly hangs 🫠

I get a bug with putting mine to sleep - becomes unresponsive and have to manual shutdown. So I've disabled sleep. With modern ssds, there is very little downtime on startup. 30-60s or so. No reason not to just shut down and save power.

You should shut down every now and then. At least on the evening you run an update, as a kernel update might've been installed.

My server is the only thing that's on 24/7. My and my partner's PCs shut down while we're not using them. It takes like 10 seconds, maybe, to boot up.

No, never. Unless I have to leave for an extended period of time or I know there's going to be a planned power outage.

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.

If I'm not actively using my PC for anything it is shut down and turned off from the wall socket. 3 monitors and a pc on the same extension, even when they're not switched on still draw power. I'm in the UK though and electricity isn't cheap.

It takes all of maybe 5-10 seconds from power on to desktop, I've barely gotten comfortable in my chair before it's ready for my login, I can't see any reason whatsoever to leave my PC powered on, ever.

Whenever you do major updates you should reboot. Most patches can be live applied, but not all.

Usually your package manager will mention if there's a need to reboot when it's done. Once a week to once a month is fine for the most part. Kinda depends on the updates that are coming out and how often you do them.

Currently runs all the time but it also runs Frigate NVR. I also access my desktop with a laptop I use as a thin client.

When I finally have Frigate setup on it's own hardware I will be shutting my desktop down when not in use.

My computer loads up in 5 sec or less. And power bills are too much to be running all the time. Even sleep with devices plugged in takes power.

I shut it down when I am not suing it. Every time.

I shut down after every use on my Linux gaming PC. My Linux servers (I currently have 3) stay on for weeks on end without being rebooted, but I try to reboot at least once a month, but I forget most months.

I shut down because, in my opinion, I want my SSDs to last longer and them not being on when not in use is my way of ensuring that. I don’t game every day, but I do usually every other day, so for them to be on for 24 hours without me using them is potentially wasting time health-wise, in my opinion. Admittedly I haven’t done the research to see how reboots affect health of an SSD, because it may be counter productive in that light if a reboot causes just as much if not more stress than just leaving it on.

But SSD health is not the only reason. My other reason is that my PC is somewhat beefy and draws a lot of power and I’m charged a shit ton in electricity costs as it is and this thing can potentially cost me a few dollars each month of being on without being in use, especially during peak hours when my rates get outrageously expensive, at double the normal rate.

And then performance is the last remaining reason. But that might be Windows PTSD where I’m just used to Windows being a butt when it hasn’t been rebooted in some time. I just feel I get the best performance when I give my PC a break when I’m not using it.

My brother uses Windows and leaves his PC on all the time and just puts it to sleep and he doesn’t seem to have issues requiring him to reboot. He games every day whereas I’m not always using my gaming PC.

Edit: got me curious about this so I finally just skimmed through some articles really quick. Apparently SSD health is not really a concern on more modern M.2 NVME type drives which is what I have (I do have one older SATA SSD) and booting may do more writes than just leaving them on, but the modern drives are built to handle this but heat is still a concern. But at the end of the day, this is just a small part of why I do. The power bill is my main reason since it can cost me a few bucks keeping it on when not in use. Performance is secondary too. Likely won’t be that bad keeping it on all the time like I do with my Linux servers.

Of course I shut down my PC when I'm not using it, what kind of question is that?

Not shut down, restart.

But with such fast boot times, I just turn it off when I'm not using it.

I come from the HDD era. This means booting an OS from an SSD feels like instant to me. I shut down my PC when I was using Windows, I shut it down using Linux. Also I shut it down when I am not using it. And it really doesn't matter if I played games or not, I don't really understand the connection between these two things.

No. It's never shut down. I suspend it when I'm not using it but never shut down.

I used to keep everything running and only turn off the screens but I changed my habit and there was a minor monthly electricity bill decrease that was worth it.

Yes like once a week reboot

For my gaming PC, I shut it down whenever I'm not actively using it.

My laptop is usually just put to sleep, and only fully powered off if I don't plan to use it for a bit, or if I'm installing updates.

My servers stay on 24/7.

Rebooting is a good idea from time to time to ensure any new updates have taken fully and that old system drivers haven't lasted and continued to run.

For example, one time I installed an XOrg update but didn't reboot because my distro's updater didn't recommend it. And so I was very confused when I actually did reboot and graphics were borked. It took me a while to track down that the update - which I'd forgotten about - hadn't been compatible with my graphics driver and I'd been using the previous working version until then.

It's supposedly possible to restart / reload all software without rebooting, but it's a royal pain in the [proverbial] when it's deep in the system, and it's far easier to just reboot.

And if you're gonna reboot anyway, you could time that nicely for before you'd be about to stop using the computer for a while. Let it reboot first to make sure everything seems OK with any updates that might have been applied. When that works, you're at a fresh slate with no programs open, so you can then turn it off.

(And if it hasn't worked, you can roll back with something like Timeshift or whatever your distro provides, check that works and save the investigation for when you have time.)

My PC is either on (when I am actively sitting in front of it working) or off (all other times). With a cool down, of course, for coffee breaks or a quick lunch.

I power off if i wont be use

I can't even get sleep to work on my computer for whatever reason.

I pretty much only ever shut down if I need to open the case for some reason, or if the battery dies.

There is occasionally an update where things don't work right without rebooting, but shutting down is pretty much completely unnecessary unless you're concerned about power consumption.

I put my desktop and laptop to sleep when I'm not home when I'm sleeping.

I give it a reboot if I'm not using it and there has been a kernal update. Sometimes games launched in Lutris breaks alt tabbing and I reboot to fix that.

I'm with the once-a-weekers

I'm using an arch based distro so I get kernel and driver updates pretty frequently that need a reboot to load. There is some weird thing I haven't found a fix for yet, where sometimes a warm reboot forgets half my RAM (likely something to do with MCR)... but a cold start works fine. So I shutdown and restart and all is well. Once a week maybe?

I shutdown every night because there's a bug where it won't wake up from sleep like 70% of the time. Easier to just shutdown than gamble and get annoyed.

It cold boots in like 20 seconds if there were no updates, so not a huge deal.