To hybernate or not to hybernate...

That's the question

Old days

For years and years I always envied my father who never had to log out of his window manager at his work, he only had to lock his screen. This meant he could leave all his terminals and text editors open at night. The next day they'd still just be there! (Later on I heard that his sysadmin asked to log out from time to time anyway, I guess that's sensible coz there will always be memory leaks -certainly in X, but anyway.)

Needless to say I always wanted my work to be there the next time I used it too! But at home there was no way that the PC would stay on day and night.

Later when at university I quickly found out that a computer in the same room as where you sleep is not compatible with a computer that is switched on.

Session Managers

Maybe I misunderstood them. But when I first heard of them (probably xsm) I thought "Wow! This is the future, I will have all my stuff still there next time I logon!"

Not.

I never used them. They're rubbish. What good is it to have my xterm still at the same position and size if my shell was not in the same directory and not running my pager anymore?

I panicked. Tossed with the idea that all these programs (bash, less, etc.) should be session aware. Luckily I didn't have the guts to look at it myself, I couldn't code in those days. Maybe I'd have wasted many weeks of my life if I could. But I was disappointed, disillusioned in modern technology.

Hibernation

Under a month ago I was lent an old laptop, that I'm using right now. Finally a great opportunity to try out Ubuntu I thought. Very neat, It did hybernation by default. So now the big surprise. If I hybernate I get everything back exactly like I left it! Isn't this what I've always dreamed off?

Clean slate

Now my experience with this is not so good as I hoped. It turns out that forcing myself to close every application makes for things not being left behind in a mess. Ok, I will open that emacs again to edit the same file, but all it's other buffers will be closed for example. Now I'm reaching the conclusion that closing as much as you can at the end of the day will result in a more efficient start up the next day. During the day I'll accumulate agian lots of windows, related and unrelated, on my 6 or so virtual desks. But closing them at the end of the day makes me forget them the next day -and that is good, they're mostely not very important anyway but would make me spend precious time on needless messing around.

Another lesson learned in life.