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Are per user timezones still absent from Windows 10 ?
Dear forum readers,
Decades after being implemented in Unix and Linux systems (it's even possible per process), is Windows still lacking ? The pre-timezone idea that hardware clock and user time representations are necessarily the same is starting to get a bit old... I know there's something available via terminal services, but even there I suspect it's not possible to specify a timezone different from the client's. And even if it's possible, what about people not using terminal services ?
19:00 in France, 18:00 in the UK, 05:00 the next day in Melbourne, Australia are the same. Same time, different representations. Other major OSes made the abstraction a long time ago.
There are good reasons to make the change. As an example, I could point the journalist working on events going on in some remote country, who wants his environment showing that country's time representation : apps, desktop, etc.
Another example : DST changes in a multiboot environment. If all OSes implement per user timezones, it's possible to have the hardware time in UTC, and each OS will update transparently without any need too fiddle with the hardware clock. But if one or more OS doesn't, things get complicated : either
- the DST change will be made manually, or
- one OS will be responsible for the change (which means the DST change won't happen as long as this OS is not booted), or
- all OSes unable to have per-user timezones will get fixed DST-free timezones, most likely UTC, or
- all OSes will rely on a time server, but what if the server is unreachable ?
But maybe I'm wrong after all and Windows 10 finally made the change, in which case I didn't find where...