I just recently upgraded Qubes to 4.3 from 4.2 without issue. I’m in the process of migrating my AppVM templates from debian-12 to debian-13-minimal. The AppVMs using debian-13-minimal are not showing the correct date/time and are defaulting to UTC.
Here’s what I’ve validated so far:
dom0 shows correct datetime
sys-net shows correct datetime
AppVMs show correct datetime with debian12
AppVMs shows incorrect datetime with debian-13-minimal
Commonly used utilities and packages described here are installed: Minimal templates — Qubes OS Documentation. systemd-timesyncd is installed
AppVM will show correct datetime when sudo dpkg-reconfigure timezone is used until reboot.
It’s clear I’m missing something in my install but I’m at a loss for what to try next.
Some more troubleshooting here. Note the issues with timezones here:
user@AppVM1:~$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'US/Central'
Failed to set time zone: Invalid or not installed time zone 'US/Central'
user@:AppVM1~$ sudo timedatectl set-timezone 'Africa/Accra'
user@AppVM1:~$ date
jeu. 19 févr. 2026 23:09:25 GMT
This is from the AppVM1 template. So I can set the timezone to an African timezone but not US. No US timezone works for me.
What an interesting interpretation of my post. Do you do this often? I’m not complaining. I am asking for help. And working through the problem “in plain air” and documenting what I’ve found.
You’ve wasted everyone’s time, including yours, with such a shallow response. If you can’t provide any technical assistance, do us all a favor and leave the topic unanswered.
Alternatively, you can avoid installing the tzdata-legacy package by setting your dom0 timezone to a continent + city, e.g. America/Chicago instead of US/Central: