Maybe I'm stupid, but I just use network time & be done with it. I recently installed Ubuntu in VMware on my Macbook, and the setup process asked if the hardware clock is set to local or UTC time. I had no idea (a) what the physical hardware clock on a Mac is set to (no GUI or plist or sysctl or other setting I'm aware of seems to comment on it one way or the other, so the question literally never comes up), and (b) what the virtual machine would think of as the "hardware" clock anyway -- The real system clock? The system time of the host OS, which may or may not disagree with the time as displayed to the user? Something else?
In any case, I just picked whatever the default was and it worked fine, so it was confusing for all of about 10 seconds, after which it ceased to make a difference. How much of this stuff is, in practice, an actual problem for a system that is, as all systems should, synchronizing the clock over NTP? -- Chris Devers
