That’s strange. As far as I can tell from any web searches, every version Windows still defaults to storing local time to the hardware clock and there are no reports of that changing with an update, nor is there any exposed setting control to configure this behavior outside of regedit. If you’re curious enough, you can check the current setting in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Windows maintains the current time as UTC if and only if the RealTimeIsUniversal key is present and nonzero.

I expect it’s more likely some other issue would make the BIOS display an hour that’s inconsistent with your local timezone. For example, maybe a bug in the BIOS, maybe a timezone offset setting within the BIOS, or maybe a dead clock battery.

Unix time is far less universal in computing than you might hope. A few exceptions I’m aware of:

• Most real-time clock hardware stores datetime as separate binary-coded decimal fields representing months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds as one byte each, and often the year too (resulting in a year 2100 limit).
• Python’s datetime, WIN32’s SYSTEMTIME, Java’s LocalDateTime, and MySQL’s DATETIME similarly have separate attributes for year, month, day, etc.
• NTFS stores a 64-bit number representing time elapsed since the year 1601 in 100-nanosecond resolution for things like file creation time.
• NTP uses an epoch of midnight 1900-01-01 with unsigned seconds elapsed and an unusual base-2 fractional part
• GPS uses an epoch of midnight 1980-01-06 with a week number and time within the week as separate values.

Converting between time formats is a common source of bugs and each one will overflow in different ways. A time value might overflow in the year 2036, 2038, 2070, 2100, 2156, or 9999.

Also, Unix time is often managed with a separate nanoseconds component for increased resolution. Like in C struct timespec, modern *nix filesystems like ext4/xfs/btrfs/zfs, etc.

as soon as the BIOS loaded and showed the time, it was “wrong” because it was in UTC

Because you don’t use Windows. Windows by default stores local time, not UTC, to the RTC. This behavior can be overriden with a registry tweak. Some Linux distro installer disks (at least Ubuntu and Fedora, maybe others) will try to detect if your system has an existing Windows install and mimicks this behavior if one exists (equivalent to timedatectl set-local-rtc 1) and otherwise defaults to storing UTC, which is the more sane choice.

Storing localtime on a computer that has more than one bootable OS becomes a particularly noticable problem in regions that observe DST, because each OS will try to change the RTC by one hour on its first boot after the time change.

Yes.

My home server has dropbear-initramfs installed so that after reboot I can access the LUKS decryption prompt over SSH. The one LUKS partition contains a btrfs filesystem with both rootfs and home as subvolumes. For all the other drives attached to that system, I use ZFS native encryption with a dataset that decrypts with a keyfile from that rootfs and I have backups of an encrypted copy of that keyfile.

I don’t think there’s a substantial performance impact but I’ve never bothered benchmarking.

Something I’ve noticed that is somewhat related but tangential to your problem: The result I’ve always gotten from using compose files is that container names and volume names get assigned names that contain a shared prefix by default. I don’t use docker and instead prefer podman but I would expect both to behave the same on this front. For example, when I have a file at nextcloud/compose.yml that looks like this:

volumes:
  nextcloud:
  db:

services:
  db:
    image: docker.io/mariadb:10.6
    ...
  app:
    image: docker.io/nextcloud
    ...

I end up with volumes named nextcloud_nextcloud and nextcloud_db, with containers named nextcloud_db and nextcloud_app, as long as neither of those services overrides this behavior by specifying a container_name. I believe this prefix probably comes from the file-level name: if there is one and the parent directory’s name otherwise.

The reasons I adjust my own compose files to be different from the image maintainer’s recommendation include: to accommodate the differences between podman and docker, avoiding conflicts between the exported listen ports, any host filesystem paths I want to mount in the container, and my own preferences. The only conflict I’ve had with other containers there is the exported port. zigbee2mqtt, nextcloud, and freshrss all suggest using port 8080 so I had to change at least two of them in order to run all three.

I never had problems with Debian stable, especially on headless server. But it’s not especially well-suited for brand new desktop hardware; even Ubuntu LTS and RHEL focus more on hardware enablement backports than Debian.

I’ve had a worse experience with Debian testing breaking my system with updates than Arch. Adding to that the freeze period (2012’s was the worst, lasting 11 months) makes testing feel like the worst of both worlds between rolling and standard release distros.

As someone who used to use Arch a decade ago: I still use pacman for devkitpro at least, and I do miss how fast its parallel downloads get, but the tool I use to manage packages is far from the most important difference between distros to me, even if you assume not needing AUR.

The first I tried was Ubuntu 7.04 but I didn’t stick with it and went back to XP. Until I ended up with a hardware setup that wouldn’t work on Windows XP (widescreen monitor + Intel graphics driver with no widescreen mode options) but worked perfectly on Ubuntu 9.10. I never truly went back to Windows since.

Tried a few other distros in 2011 then switched to Arch for a couple years, Xubuntu for a couple years, Ubuntu GNOME for 7-8 years, and finally switched to Fedora last year.

That’s actually a choice you’re offered during Debian’s interactive install. When you’re offered the option to set a root password, if you leave it empty the system will disable direct root login and instead give your first normal user sudo access.

Debian. I was in a similar boat to OP and just a couple weeks ago migrated my almost 8-year-old home server setup from Ubuntu LTS to Debian Stable. Decided to finally move away from Ubuntu because I never cared for snap (had to keep removing it with every upgrade) and gradually gained a few smaller issues with Ubuntu. Seems good to me so far.

I considered RHEL/Rocky but decided against them largely because I wanted btrfs for my rootfs, which their stock kernel doesn’t have, though I use a few Red Hat developed tools like podman and cockpit. Fedora Server and the like have too fast a release lifecycle for my liking, though I use Fedora for my desktop. That left Debian as the one remaining obvious choice.

I also briefly considered throwing a Debian VM into TrueNAS Scale, since I also use this system as a ZFS NAS, but setting that up felt like I was fighting against the “appliance” nature of what TrueNAS tries to be.