Since I installed Debian yesterday, my system clock has been inaccurate. I think cause my bios clock is inaccurate since I cleared the cmos before installing my OS. Interestingly, debian has no built in way to update the system clock. There is no default server that is communicated with to set the time for you. It is assumed that if you want to know what time it is, you’ll set it up yourself. What the hell? Haven’t we agreed that because I’m in the central united states, the time is decided for me already? I told you I’m in America/Chicago, what more do you want from me?

So I checked out the debian wiki entry for datetime and found that I had a couple of options for managing my system time. I had to do a bit of research to decide which tool I wanted to install to run as my timekeeping daemon and I settled on chrony.

After installing chrony from apt, I checked out /etc/chrony/chrony.conf as recommended by the debian wiki. From here I found a couple of READMEs and discovered I could run the command man chrony.conf. This man page, along with the two readmes i found helped me to understand that I needed to create a .sources file in /etc/chrony/sources.d and define my source in it. According to the man page I found earlier, I decided to make a file with “server time-a-g.nist.gov iburst”. This indicates that I will retrieve the time from time-a-g.nist.gov. To get the time, I’ll send a burst of 4-8 packets and statistically, one of them should get me the time. As soon as I wrote the file, I saw my system clock in the corner update. The whole process took about 30 minutes.

While I was initially indignant that I needed to manually tell my PC how to figure out what time it is. I do prefer that the debian maintainers left the decision to me. If I decide I want my OS supplier to decide what time I should be following, what else should they decide for me? How can one configuration be correct for all users? Microsoft seems to think that the best configuration isn’t one that suits the users interests, but their own. Pushing copilot, providing search results ranked by bing, encouraging that you install candy crush, demanding you sign in with your microsoft account so that you can be tracked beyond your OS. While I obviously don’t trust microsoft, I don’t think I want to trust anybody to decide what time I should see or to decide anything for me. Who knows when a seemingly good actor will turn. And when they do, I might already be in too deep.

I’ll happily spend 30 minutes getting my system clock to work, 2 hours installing steam and elden ring, and so on. Because I don’t want to be somebody else’s bitch. Maybe some day the lord god himself will anoint a prophet to build a new operating system to serve as the third temple of Jeruselem. Then, I might be convinced to switch.