UTC or LOCAL when installing Debian

[nadebula1984]

I installed Debian testing using Debian Installer weekly build. There was an existing Windows installation on another hard disk. The installer detected it and automatically configured its boot option.

When I booted into newly installed Debian, I found that the time was different from Windows, where I already set to treating hardware time as UTC and disabling internet time service. After browsing Debian wiki, I returned to Debian and checked /etc/adjtime. Then I found that the configuration file was set to LOCAL. Was this simply because any existing Windows installation was detected during installation? I've never seen this before.

[jwrober]

I think that must be new. I recently purchased a new laptop that has Windows on it and loaded a fresh copy of Buster along side the Windows and I had to manually set my HW clock to local time so Windows would go to UTC. That is a nice feature.

[NFT5]

Not new. Setting to UTC or Local time has been an installation option for a long time, as has the detection of Windows and set to Local.

[Mr. Lumbergh]

Local all the way. I don't care what time it is in Greenwich. You can set which is used in the installation options, or reset after the fact.

[p.H]

I had to manually set my HW clock to local time so Windows would go to UTC.

You got it wrong. If you configure Windows for UTC, you must set the hardware clock to UTC too (as in Debian).

Local all the way. I don't care what time it is in Greenwich.

1) UTC is not Greenwich time. It is an arbitrary reference time used internally which is not affected by daylight saving changes. You (and I) do not care about epoch time either, even though it is used internally by the system.

2) When the local time zone has daylight saving time shifts, setting the hardware clock to local time has issues with multiboot : each operating system will do the time shift, not knowing that another one already did it, resulting in a wrong local time. Fortunately NTP may silently correct it before you notice.

Bottom line : the hardware clock should be set to UTC unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

When dual-booting the best approach is to make Windows obey a sane time standard: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy ... in_Windows

Local time is bollocks...