I've been logging in to Unix machines for what is now quite a long time. When I started, it was traditional for your login process to be noisy. The login process itself would tell you last login details and the 'message of the day' ('motd'), and people often made their shell .profile or .login report more things, so you could see things like:

Last login: Tue Feb 10 22:16:14 2026 from 128.100.X.Y
 22:22:42 up 1 day, 11:22,  3 users,  load average: 0.40, 2.95, 3.30
cks cks cks
[output from fortune elided]
: <host> ;

(There is no motd shown here but it otherwise hits the typical high points, including a quote from fortune . People didn't always use 'fortune' itself but printing a randomly selected quote on login used to be common.)

Many years ago I modified my shell environment on our servers so that it wouldn't report the currently logged in users, show the motd, or tell me my last login. But I kept the ' uptime ' line:

$ ssh cs.toronto.edu
 22:26:05 up 209 days,  5:26, 167 users,  load average: 0.47, 0.51, 0.60
: apps0.cs ;

Except, I typically didn't see that. I see this only on full login sessions, and when I was in the office I typically used special tools ( also , also , also ) that didn't actually start a login session and so didn't show me this greeting banner. Only when I was at home did I do SSH logins ( with tooling ) and so see this, and I didn't do that very much (because I didn't normally work from home, so I had no reason to be routinely opening windows on our servers).

As a long term result of that 2020 thing I work from home a lot more these days and so I open up a lot more SSH logins than I used to. Recently I was thinking about how to make this feel nicer, and it struck me that one of the things I found quietly annoying was that line from 'uptime' (to the point that sometimes my first action on login was to run 'clear', so I had a clean window). It was the one last thing cluttering up 'give me a new window on host X' and making the home experience visibly different from the office experience.

So far I've taken only a small step forward. I've made it so that I skip running 'uptime' if I'm logging in from home and the load on the machine I'm logging in to is sufficiently low to be uninteresting (which is often the case). As I get used to (or really, accept) this little change, I'll probably slowly move to silence 'uptime' more often.

When I think about it, making this change feels long overdue. Printing out all sorts of things on login made sense in a world where I logged in to places relatively infrequently. But that's not the case in my world any more. My terminal windows are mostly transient and I mostly work on servers that I have to start new windows on, and right from very early I made my office environment not treat them as login sessions, with the full output and everything (if I cared about routinely seeing the load on a server, that's what xload was for ( cf )).

( I'm bad about admitting to myself that my usage has shifted and old settings no longer make sense .)