My favorite version of that is of course, Moss’ take on it.
Heh, a hard reboot won’t always do it. I’ve seen several IPMI systems that will become unavailable and potentially drag down the system until you power the system down and yank the power cable for a few minutes. Anything less, and the IMPI system will still be at best useless.
But aside from that kind of issue, if I’m working on a Linux or BSD box and it doesn’t need to load a new kernel, I see a reboot as a sign of defeat. I wasn’t smart enough to figure out what process to stop/start, and maybe what file to adjust (mayhaps delete). Sometimes it’s easier and more prudent to reboot it, even if it does make me sad.
Do I feel the same about Windows? No, you update an app or look at it funny, and it’ll start nagging you to reboot. It’s just part of Windows town. Doesn’t make it bad, just a little tiresome.
And yeah, rebooting is a great way to clear OS level memory leaks. Or clearing memory leaks on devices you don’t have fine grained control of such as killing off/restarting particular processes.
If I can offer one bit of advice on the reboots: try to use your device’s clean reboot or power down whenever possible. Even though most filesystems these days can handle an unclean reboot, the underlying programs still sometimes have a really hard time of it.