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Comment by jmuguy | Hacker News Reader

Windows Time bullshit was one of the most annoying things I dealt with during my years as an IT guy. Registering and unregistering w32time, trying different NTP servers. Trying to figure out why domain systems werent getting their time from the DC. It always felt so... stupid. Surely having the correct time on a device isnt that complicated. Turns out, its not, unless you're on Windows. Somewhat ironic that these days the only Windows system I have to deal with is my gaming PC. It refuses to sync with time.windows.com.

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It's probably still the case that Windows will consider the firmware clock more reliable than anything but a stratum 1 (direct gps/glonas/atomic) or maybe 2 time source which can result in truly bizarre behavior if the firmwar/hypervisor drifts too far from dozens of stratum 2 or 3 active directory servers. It logs no messages about this logic fork.

I don't recall the exact conditions that determine this but troubleshooting it is an exercise in thinking you're having a stroke.

I have a Windows work laptop that sometimes drifts up to 10 minutes off the correct time despite time/date settings saying it has synced every day. It won't even let me correct the time because of an enterprise policy requiring it to use network time. Then one day it will be back to the correct time and the drift cycle begins anew.

I find some humor in this being somewhat familiar with the history of clocks and watches. Forever the battle was making the most accurate time pieces possible, with wrist watches eventually reaching a few seconds per day variance before digital watches took over. And new we have something trillions of times more complicated and is performing worse

There are ways said to circumvent the enterprise policy on the autosync side, like unregistering win32tm or deleting all servers from the registry. No idea about setting the time though…

(A smarter time daemon like chrony would've kept track of the RTC drift.)

I have the exact same issue at my office. Do anyone has a solution to that. I'd appreciate it greatly. Thanks

I decided a while ago that I was willing to sacrifice a few (and it's very few now - mostly just some anti-cheat using ones) games to just go Linux full time. I don't miss Windows one bit (well except Photoshop I guess :/) and I game a lot.

Unless you need the newest features, Photoshop runs surprisingly well under Wine - and I don't mean this in the usual "oh yea, Wine totally works" way where it's a huge pain to set up and is 90% luck, it actually runs with barely more glitches than on Windows (not zero, but it's Adobe software, so you can't expect much).

This is the installer I used to use: https://github.com/Gictorbit/photoshopCClinux

This one is newer and looks even more promising: https://github.com/LinSoftWin/Photoshop-CC2022-Linux

Photopea is probably your best photoshop alternative that runs in Linux.

I use the art side more, which Krita is ok for and Darktable for bulk processing. It's mainly that most online guides, utils and demos are done in PS so harder to follow.

Unfortunately, for photography, Darktable really doesn't get close to Lightroom. Most of the tools are more clunky, the performance is worse (and Lightroom is already painfully slow) and most critically, the quality of the edits is significantly worse. Taking the same significantly under-exposed photo into both and boosting the exposure to roughly the same brightness produces results that are so wildly different in noise level and artefacts that you wouldn't believe they had the same input.

In 1996 I was supporting a small dialup operation, and one of our customers was having non-stop problems connecting via modem.

Their plant was 2 hours away, but I was driving past there to visit a friend, so I made arrangements to drop by and investigate.

For reasons unknown, most of their Windows desktops were configured to a year in the 21st century, probably 2096 instead of 1996 but it’s been a while. Wish I knew how they ended up that way, but I’m surprised dialup was the only thing they noticed that was broken.

A lot of shareware back then stopped working after a certain # of calendar days, which it used windows to figure out. So I always had my date set far in the future.

How does that work? Surely you'd set it to the past. Unless it's a $networkDate - $installDate > $x thing.

you're right--I think the trick must have been to set the computer date far in the future when installing the software, then return to the correct date for future executions.

Windows isn't the only thing with issues. Both ntpd and systemd-timesyncd can be very annoying if upstream servers send a bad stratum value, and the maintainence team of upstream is a bunch of morons taking weeks to fix it. You can't say "forcibly use IP w.x.y.z no matter what" to either of them.

I had this recently when one of the time servers I use was accidentally reset (somehow) and ended up on the previous GPS era, i.e. 20 years wrong.

  /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf
  NTP=w.x.y.z

  /etc/ntp.conf
  server w.x.y.z iburst

with unaffected servers fixed it.

> You can't say "forcibly use IP w.x.y.z no matter what" to either of them.

That doesn't sound right. Are you using some kind of externally controlled list of round-robin servers?

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