In kde4, one could open time/date settings, check and uncheck the option to set date/time automatically, and press apply/ok. This would pause for a few seconds, in which the time was synchronized immediately. In kde5, it doesn't seem to do this - I'm actually not sure, maybe it does so in the background immediately but there is no feedback that this is happening. In either case, it would be much better for usability if there was just an explicit 'synchronize now' or 'update now' button that initiated an immediate time synchronization with proper user feedback (throbber or mouse cursor feedback or whatever). btw iirc the kde4 also had a way to choose the ntp server to use. This is gone in kde5. It is unclear if/how/where that can be configured. Reproducible: Always
>This would pause for a few seconds, in which the time was synchronized immediately. In kde5, it doesn't seem to do this That's because I made it faster. (from a 5 second deadlock to roughly 100 ms) I'm not reintroducing a bug. Also with timesyncd there should no reason to sync manually? What's the situtation when this occurs. >btw iirc the kde4 also had a way to choose the ntp server to use. This is gone in kde5. It is unclear if/how/where that can be configured. /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf Given it's something only sysadmins would want to change, I think it's best being only editing the config file of the daemon, which is how sysadmins tend to prefer to operate anyway.
That's a great performance improvement! Where was all that time wasted? I don't know how often the time syncs automatically now, but at least in kde4 it wasn't always good enough. That is to say, occasionally before doing something that required me to see a pretty accurate time (e.g. setting the time on an external clock), I'd do the check-uncheck-apply thing, and usually I would see it jump between several to many seconds away. It nearly never happened that I didn't see it change (i.e. it was already accurate to the second), unless I did it twice in a row. As a user I don't know if/when it was last synced, and from experience I couldn't trust it to always be right on time, so I got into the habit of syncing manually like that when I wanted to be sure it's accurate. It's a bit vague, but that's the use case - wanting to know it's currently accurate (which is not always the case). Doing check-uncheck-apply, although it works well, is a bit hackish usability-wise, it feels more like gaming the GUI than an intended UI action. fwiw, Windows XP had a proper 'sync now' button on the clock settings dialog, though for some reason it nearly always returned an error after a long delay :-) I have no idea how it is in later versions, since I moved to KDE long ago ;-) As for configuring the server - fair enough. I was just surprised it disappeared.