Some views on having your system timezone set to UTC
There are two problems here.<p>In my experience most people, including most developers but perhaps excluding many HN readers, don&#x27;t understand what the timezone setting does. The time on all contemporary computers is always Unix Epoch Time, which is close to (but not exactly) UTC. Setting your timezone doesn&#x27;t actually change anything about how time works on the computer. It just changes how time is printed. That&#x27;s it.<p>So the second problem is that our text-based server world, for all its benefits, doesn&#x27;t cope well with per-user parameters. I mean ... timezone support on Unix is basically buggy. It doesn&#x27;t matter what TZ I set in my .profile, nevertheless the timezone of logs is in whatever TZ the server is running in. That&#x27;s pretty stupid. And even simple calculations like &quot;how many seconds elapsed between this log entry and this one&quot; - which is really common - are very difficult, regardless of the TZ setting.<p>In my own personal perfect world, all logs would be printed in the first column of log files using the epoch time in seconds, and we&#x27;d have a command which would convert from the epoch time to the local timezone. So we could do something like:<p><pre><code>   tail -f &#x2F;var&#x2F;log&#x2F;messages | grep &#x27;panic&#x27; | timestamp
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...in which case I would be able to choose the timezone and format of the timestamps to meet the needs of the job i was doing.<p>So for me, this whole argument over UTC is dumb. It doesn&#x27;t matter what timezone the system is set to; any zone can be &quot;default&quot;. The real problem is that different users have different time formatting requirements, and to date we haven&#x27;t had tools which deal with that properly.<p>(even logging all timestamps consistently in ISO format would be a big step up...)