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Subject: Re: Does Dimdows Know What Time It Is?
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2024 14:59:43 -0400
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On 9/28/2024 6:40 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> Something Unix did that was different from most other OSes was, its system
> clock kept time in UTC (or GMT, in pre-UTC days). Linux does the same.
> When you use a command like “date” to see what the current date and time
> is, it converts that UTC time to a local time in some specified timezone.
> Changing the timezone is as easy as specifying a new value for the TZ
> environment variable.
> 
> Windows, on the other hand, keeps its system clock in local time, in some
> specific time zone that is assumed to apply systemwide.
> 
> This is a particularly dumb idea when you realize how much it complicates
> things if your time zone has daylight saving time. We have seen this sort
> of thing happen on Windows systems before, where they might forget to
> adjust the clock to start/stop daylight saving, or even adjust it twice so
> you end up being an hour off in the opposite direction.
> 
> This can’t happen on Linux systems, because there is no turning daylight
> saving “on” or “off” as such: there is simply a table of local time
> offsets (from the “tzdata” files), and the correct offset to apply depends
> only on the actual UTC time value, not on the current setting of any
> system flag.
> 
> This also makes it easy to convert between UTC and local times at any time
> in the past, for any time zone.


I NEVER trust Linux to keep time.  I've encountered several occurrences 
of it dropping 5-7 minutes over a 1-hour period.


* user error
* Linux is just the kernel
* RTFM newb
* Linux is perfect
* you're lying
* works for me
* you have the source code, fix it yourself