Hi there,


I am running Mint Debian dualboot with win8 and got an annoying problem. I set the correct location during installation, but everytime I boot windows the time will change to UTC, I don't see how I can change the time zone. After searching for answer I found this, a 7yrs. old bug still exist today !



https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/275

That's not a Mint bug, it's a Windows bug -- Windows, unless modified, insists that the real time clock be set to local time rather than UTC. The fix is stated on the linked page and is to set a Windows registry value allowing it to use UTC.
I can only speculate that the bug stems from when DOS was written and a naive customer might have been confused by a system clock set to UTC so the writer of DOS decided to set the RTC to local time to avoid this. Seems that there's at least one place where they're asking for this to be changed.

The "bug" is called Windows.

UTC/GMT has been used as the basis for common time reference since the concept was invented.
Microsoft chose to ignore the world and use local time.

it's not a Linux bug.
and AFAIK, many Linux distros even accomodate Dual booters, by offering an option to set the hardware clock to local time.
so there's 2 solutions, 1 for each operating system.

You can change linux's interpretation of the system clock with 'timedatectl'.

Thank guys for the input. I mainly run Linux and occasionally dualboot to Windows, I already set local time reference on Debian, but it changed the BIOS to UTC time, windows is not to blame in this case, and windows did not always time sync to correct the error, or until after a long delay, I mainly use Debian so no idea how other distro works.

As you can see, it's possible to change Windows to be like Linux or Linux to be like Windows. The difference is a matter of history.

Linux is intended to work like Unix, which started on 1960s mainframes. Since few companies could afford one, many used a computer bureau — like cloud computing. In the USA, that meant that the mainframe and the users terminal could be in different time zones or switch to daylight saving on different dates. To to avoid chaos, everyone used GMT/UTC.

Windows, of course, was a successor to MS-DOS. In the early 1980s, desktop computers did not come with batteries. When I switched on my computer, the first thing it did was to ask me to enter the date and time. Naturally, it expected the user to consult their watch — and not to convert to UTC!

Debian and, by extension, Mint's setting for "system clock is local time" may or may not be buggy but that is just a workaround for the intrinsic Windows bug. I don't know what Apple do about time but they, too, have publicly messed it up also.
The only way to deal with timne correctly is using UTC and converting for user convenience when necessary. I'll link to this again:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html
Time is tough but the Microsoft approach is brain-dead.
Apologies for ranting but it really is pqathetic stuff like this which cause needless problems all over the place and this is one of the obvious examples os where sticking to "user friendly" is hurting everyone.

Understand, time clock difference would not be a problem if I did not dualboot, but more of a problem if I dualboot and access those high security server with time limited access and the auto time sync did not catch up quick enough.

have you tried the windows fix outlined in post #2?