On linux a lot of the time you kinda have to shut down because it either won't go to sleep ("failed to freeze" some process or another) or it will hang or lock up during/after wake - especially if it has nvidia with its binary blobs, but i've had problems with (in kernel, open source) network card drivers too. Since I first had problems like this with linux 2 decades ago, it seems like they will never be able to figure it out.

Some of this seems to be getting worse with the move to wayland. There is no design concept like windows D3D device reset or lost device, or display timeout/recovery, so drivers are apparently charged with perfectly remembering all the state that compositors create, through all the sleep states, with predictably bad results.

I think your model of open/closed is incomplete and thus misleading. There are more states to a process than "active" and "inactive," and it is not optimal for the system to simply move processes between those two gross states. The obvious example is non-foreground apps during multitasking. A less obvious example is an app during a background refresh.

"Fully closing" a process is not necessarily cleaner than letting the system allocate intelligently, despite what one's puritanical upbringing might make them believe. (Consider how artists often need a messy space to optimally hold their processes.)

> I believe this is because of how Mac is designed

Yes, that they actually got sleep working properly.

That is not true, when you close apps on macOS the process(es) really are finished, just like on Windows or Linux.

I think a large part is also how long it takes to restart a Mac. Every so often a coworker has to restart and I could probably restart my Linux (or even Windows) laptop 3 times before they're back on.

Kind of reminds me of how slow Windows computers used to boot back in the Vista and 7 era.

As a Linux user, it pisses me off whenever I am forced to reboot, and I'm very disappointed if my laptop uptime is measured in less than months.

Needing to shut down to me indicates something is broken.

I think what you're talking about is how on Mac, an application can stay running without having any windows. Separate from closing all the windows, you usually have to "Quit" the application if you really want it gone. This is useful for a couple reasons:

- You can "Quit" the application without closing all the windows, and then the next time you start the application, your windows can come back.

- You can close all the windows without "Quit"ting the application, and you don't have to wait for the application to load again in order to open a window later.

Additionally, since application lifecycle is managed separately from the open windows, apps can do cool things like saving and restoring the set of open windows through a system restart. Which Windows and Linux still haven't managed. (Maybe Windows can try to restart the processes... I think I saw that becoming an option more recently)

I've never rebooted often in general, even when I daily-drove Windows. Then, it was because it was annoying to get my preferred workspace back after a Windows restart. Now, I daily-drive macOS and I don't often reboot until the machine gets slow/janky because the machine doesn't really need a reboot until then. And I don't hate reboots as much as I would for Windows because macOS is a lot better at session restoration

my every day use macbook I expect 150+ days uptime before something goes wonky that forces a reboot