It's unlikely that this would matter to most people, but leaving the computer sleeping rather than hibernated or shutdown partially defeats any full disk encryption. Recovering keys from RAM is possible for a short period of time after power is removed. [1] Microsoft suggests disabling sleep when using bitlocker encryption. [2] And it is similarly suggested that Ubuntu use suspend-to-disk (hibernate) rather than suspend-to-RAM (sleep) when utilizing full disk encryption. [3] For better security leave the computer shutdown when not using it.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack 2.https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i... 3. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/208921/is-suspe...

Likely the bigger impact is on the HVAC cost. Test it out some time. Have your facilities team show you HVAC power consumption for a month. Then for a month, turn off all the PC's on the weekend and after hours.

Technically yes. There are 3 types of phenomena that cause transistors to degrade or fail. All 3 are caused by electrons flowing through the gates. See https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n...

Practically speaking, however, I doubt it makes much of a difference for most desktop systems.

There's way more in computers than transistors ; you have to weigh that against the other effects on the complete system. I would be surprised if the thermal cycling from shutting down and booting the computer wasn't orders of magnitude more likely to cause problems than actual wear on the transistors. That being said, all of these issues are very unlikely to occur.

There's a certain amount of electromigration that happens in silicon transistors with a voltage applied but it scales strongly with temperature so I wouldn't worry if the processor is idle. I suppose mechanical wear on the fans is a concern?

Probably more harmful to the active software session than the hardware. A lot of programs (OS's included) have subtle memory leaks and other obscure bugs than can take multiple days to manifest.

As a Linux user, I confirm that I only switch off my PCs when there is a power outage.