[fao_]

> every 6 months

Most people don't want or can't afford to have their computer running 24/7. Especially if they're not using it for more than 11 hours of that day. And if you use more than one OS on one computer, fast startup can save you a lot of time switching between those.

> I'm not sure people realize how much complexity you have to add to make a system boot even a couple of seconds faster.

Not true. I shaved 20 seconds off my boot time recently, by digging around in config files and disabling services that were never used, by backgrounding non-essential services that took a long time to start up, and by reducing the grub bootloader time. Everything I did was trivial, yet it cumulatively brought a large reduction in startup time, it's gone from one minute to ~30ish seconds now.

[wahern]

  Most people don't want or can't afford to have their
  computer running 24/7

I guess I shouldn't make too many assumptions. I'm sure plenty of people are still using Windows on 10-year-old towers attached to CRTs. But my Macbook Air goes several months without a reboot, as did my previous one, and the one before it, going back at least 10 years. I don't even think about it. My servers are rebooted much more often, simply because of kernel patches and upgrades. Fortunately startup is usually quick for both OpenBSD and Linux as, ironically, there are far fewer services and the hardware is less complex than typical consumer machines.

[xorcist]

> Most people don't want or can't afford to have their computer running 24/7

I think the various power save modes have replaced shutdown for most personal computers. Even on my desktop (yes, I still have one of those at home) I just suspend it and only reboot on certain upgrades.

[milcron]

> Most people don't want or can't afford to have their computer running 24/7.

I'm always telling my family and friends to reboot their damn computers every now and then. In my experience most people never turn their PCs off.