Bonum Certa Men Certa

Reboots Should Never be Necessary

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 14, 2025,
updated Jul 15, 2025

happy birthday, netbsd!

Good, solid, reliable systems should be designed to maximise uptime (without compromising aspects such as security). That means they ought to minimise a repeated "need" (or supposed requirement) to bootstrap over and over again. That isn't technically infeasible.

At the moment we have three machines here with an uptime of around 500 days and more. They're not reachable from the outside world, except if someone does something to them through the browser (which they themselves access), malicious attachment in E-mail, and so on. My main laptop will exceed 2 years' uptime a few months from now:

$ uptime
 20:55:14 up 644 days,  2:40, 38 users,  load average: 0.79, 0.69, 0.56

To me, each reboot represents some kind of failure. I still patch the software by the way.

Earlier today I rebooted one other machine, which is neither primary nor secondary. It was already chronically low on RAM, I assume due to accumulation of memory leaks. They add up. What really should have taken about 5 minutes (at most) took almost half an hour because the HDMI "cable" (they're computers shaped like cables) decided to throw tantrums. It's not the first time a reboot over here caused monitor-related perils. HDMI is, after all, just a DRM carrier. Then, restoring the session (about a dozen windows) took quite some time. Connecting to other machines and running things on them demands a lot of manual work. So it's hard to imagine having to do this every week. It would severely harm productivity.

The idea that reboots are "normal" was 'popularised' (people meant to assume this was acceptable) by Windows. Prior to the 90s, as homes did not have Internet access, it was common to power off the PC while it wasn't in use. So reboots weren't yet "a thing".

Years ago I complained that IBM's design was rather bad; when installing Flatpak support the user would be expected to then reboot the PC. Why? Whose idea was this? There must be another way.

Society already wastes a lot of money and time on worthless "apps" and other supposedly 'modern' nonsense. Need we also expect everyone to reboot machines and try to restore sessions, lessening not only productivity but also reliability?

"BUT WHAT ABOUT SECURITY!!"

Yes, security. That's what they always tell us. The vast majority of computers aren't servers and don't sit there on the Net with a publicly- or world-facing IP address. They're not multi-user, either. This means that patching one's browser is mostly enough for most computers (also, browsers are pressured to do much more than render pages; that's wrong and leads to hidden dangers).

I regularly update my Net-facing machines, but there are only two such machines. For machines used to do work it would be risky to constantly make changes at every level. â–ˆ

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