I am a student and I have 10 to 12 tabs open on chrome, 8 PDFs open on Sumatra PDF in tabbed manner, some folders open to access my notes and PDFs; always open!!!!!

But you know how Windows OS works, frequent updates and shutdown reboot blah blah blah. Even I keep my system always in hibernation. Now I have done some tweaks to postpone updates but still some processes consume RAM CPU and even my Internet Data.

So I will switch to linux but based on most linux users and forums and websites, Linux is not good at Hibernation and Suspend stuff. But I want to use my Linux with all the files open for months without Shutdown and Reboot. There are issues with Suspend what I have seen online or Hibernation. So how can I use my Linux even if it gets shutdown or reboot and I will resume my work from where I left.

Is it fine to use Linux without update, no Shutdown, no Reboot for months??!!!! Only suspend or hibernation !!
You can recommend any stable and reliable distro for a newbie!!

Most people who use Linux on a laptop also use sleep and/or hibernate. I'm not one of them but I'm sure some laptop users here will engage with your worries about hibernation. Remember that to hibernate and recover successfully, you need to set up a swap partition big enough to accommodate the whole of the memory image stored in RAM.

Running Linux for long periods without shutting down or rebooting is very common. It's how servers work after all. They only shut down for maintenance. As to updates, in Linux you update when you want; it's not enforced on you as it is in Windows, and you don't need to reboot afterwards. But I would recommend regular updates (I do mine monthly) for security reasons.

Some people here are chary of recommending a distro because users vary so much in their requirements. But Mint is one often recommended to people in your situation. It's novice-friendly and very good on the sort of firmware that some wifi cards need.

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Yup, there is absolutely no issues with keeping a Linux system up and running without rebooting for months. The longest I have gone without rebooting is a little over a year and then also the system was rebooted because I accidentally unplugged the wrong power cable. My current system's uptime is 45 days and counting.

Ubuntu is a good flavor for new comers, though I personally prefer Debian.

- Suramya

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Welcome to LQ.

Still you may wish to consider bookmarks, the concept of recent documents, and also organizing documents so you have easy recall of them.

Either way you can keep Linux up all the time or have it sleep or hibernate. Not sure that there's specific problems with Linux hibernation and all PCs. Perhaps you should share the system specs and people can assist you further.

My best uptime was about a year and a half.

If you do not select "automatic updates," your system will not reboot. But, most operating-system updates necessarily involve rebooting in order to load the updated kernel into memory.

The best "reboot to ready" that I ever got was somewhere six to eleven seconds.

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In my experience kernel updates are fairly rare unless you choose a bleeding edge distro like Fedora or Arch. Stick with something like Debian Stable (or LMDE if you want a Mint flavour) and you'll probably only get the odd security update.

+1 . Also, at least with Firefox, it saves the tabs that are open when you restart Firefox. Never used Chrome. Get organized .

Building on what rclark said, Firefox has a setting under Edit-->Settings-->General-->Startup, to "restore previous session."

I haven't used that setting (but I might start now on one machine where I pretty much visit the same websites all the time), but I've found that if I reboot without closing Firefox, it will ask whether I want the previous setting restored; I've found the restore works quite nicely.

As for suspend, I suspend my laptop almost every day, unless I have a positive need to reboot it (such as a kernel update), and have not yet encountered an issue. That particularly laptop is running Debian Sid, but I had the same experience with my previous laptop, which was running Mageia when it breathed its last.

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I keep several different browsers open full time, and booted full time, with anywhere between tens and hundreds of open tabs in each, except for when rebooting to start a new kernel, or mechanical maintenance. The browsers have no problem remembering the state they were left in when reopened. So too some other apps.

Visit http://distrowatch.com/ to see descriptions of some of the hundreds of distros out there. Note in the summaries that many are derived from other distros, notably Ubuntu being based upon Debian, and Mint being based upon Ubuntu, and therefore a derivation of a derivation.

IMO, until you've picked your favorite DE from among the many choices, you're best off starting with one of the distros that offer to install most or all the DEs together on a single installation[1], to simplify picking a favorite. With multiples installed, it's essentially necessary only to log out and back in to switch among those installed.

[1] No installation media from any distro can hold all DEs, so in most distros it's not possible to install all that are available on initial installation. It may though be possible with some by installing from the Internet. Normally one installs a single DE initially, and adds others after booting to whatever was first installed using the distro's "package management system". These include Apt*, DNF, Pacman, URPM, YUM and Zypper, among others.

This is a complete misinterpretation of what you're seeing.
People only post when they have a problem. The same probably happens when you search for windows suspend hibernate problem.

Linux is very good at hibernation or suspend (I use hibernation).

That said, after a kernel upgrade (and rarely with other packages, too) it is recommended to do a full reboot.

Also see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Suspend_and_Hibernate

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Wow, that is awesome!!!
Which distro you are using? and how did you optimise it for using without Shutdown or Reboot?
So you only do suspend or hibernation?? Right??

Was that without hibernation or sleep?

I've heard those anecdotes. I've only had very infrequent problems with hibernation on my OpenSUSE-based laptop.

I can't say anything about months but I've had good luck going weeks without an actual reboot. I tend to not go very long without patching, though, so if the patches require a reboot, I suck it up and reboot after saving my session. (Note: I don't recall whether OpenSUSE was configured to save my session by default or whether I had to enable it. Nice feature, though.) I usually let Firefox (sorry... I only use Chrome for a few sites for work that don't work with anything else) get clobbered by the shutdown. FF tends to recover tabs w/o any problems. Also, when I've had FF go catatonic due to some flaky web page, killing it w/ "pkill -9 firefox" and re-launching it recovers the previously open windows and tabs very nicely. If you're paranoid about losing tabs, though, simply right click, select all tabs, then right-click again, and bookmark all of them into a new "folder". Reloading them from the newly-created bookmarks doesn't take long. You might try and see if that process works for you when running Chrome.

Thank you... don't mind if I do. As I mentioned above, OpenSUSE has worked well for me. And I'm using it on an old Dell Inspiron laptop that still has the MS Vista sticker on it (i.e., it's not a bleeding edge laptop).

Hope this help some...

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that hibernation depends on your having sufficient swap space (at least in size equal to your installed RAM) in order to have somewhere to stash the state of the system when it goes into hibernation. For fun, take a look at the output of "cat /proc/cmdline (noting the "resume=" part of the command line if it exists) and the output of "lsblk -f" and compare the UUID information with what was in the boot command line. I would hazard a guess that the people that report having trouble with hibernation either never created a swap partition when installing Linux or didn't create one large enough for hibernation to work properly. Disk space is pretty cheap nowadays so I create the swap partition... and make it at least 1X the physical RAM.

Again... hope this helps.

The problem is that people always forget that Linux can be installed on a huge variety of devices, and compatibility will never be 100% for all of them.(*)

And then they compare that to Windows or MacOS.

Or, in other words, if I bought my Windows preinstalled on my laptop, I would be miffed if hibernation doesn't work.
But try to install Windows yourself on any machine, I dare you!

(*) but even if you experience one of those rare cases, usually there's a fix.

I am running Debian (Testing) on both my Desktop and Laptop. The desktop I don't suspend or hibernate, but on the laptop I do that very frequently and so far haven't hit any issues resuming from sleep.

The year+ long uptime was without hibernate or sleep while running Seti@Home 24x7.