YoniV when I turn it back on, I need to restart everything
I solved the problem of needing to reconnect everything during a restart by implementing "hibernate" for all of my laptops and desktops. For me it's a perfect solution, but it does require a bit of preparation, so it's best to implement it as part of a fresh installation. For me, it was well worth it.
When a machine hibernates, it stores the entire current session into its swap partition, and shuts down completely. It actually turns off, just as if it were powered down. The difference comes when the machine is restarted. Instead of starting fresh, the computer reloads the stored contents of RAM from the swap partition, and continues with the previous session as if nothing had happened. It's as if it were never shut down at all, even though it was.
Since I usually have many applications in use at the end of a day--email, browser, games, file manager, settings, terminal, etc.--using hibernation means I don't need to launch all of those when I restart the computer the next morning. And it means the computer(s) used no electricity by running all night. I use some of my machines only occasionally, but if it's been a few days (or longer) since the last time I needed one of them, it starts up each time ready to go again as if it hadn't been shut down at all.
For a computer to be able to hibernate, its swap must be at least the size of the amount of RAM in use when it's shut down. It's safest to make sure that it's the size of RAM plus a bit more, in case some of the swap was already in use. I make my swap partitions 1.5 times the size of RAM, so I should always be able to hibernate safely. That means one of my laptops with 16 GB of RAM gets a swap partition of 24 GB, and I should never need to worry about it. A VM with 4 GB of RAM gets a 6 GB swap partition.
This usually means working with a partitioner like GParted before doing an installation, to create a swap partition of the right size before you run the installer. Any "live" .ISO session will let you do that. It means re-installing your OS, of course, and reconfiguring everything one more time, but for me it was well worth it. It might be a good answer for you as well.
