To start with NixOS

Help
1

Hello to the forum…
After installing Nixos, I’m having two problems:

  1. getting the mouse left double-click to work with a single middle click
  2. having my machine’s clock set to my local time instead of UTC
    I’m currently using Wayland on KDE…
    Thanks, bye.
2

Share the output of timedatectl.

How’d you do this on whichever other distro?

3

You can change the computer’s timezone with this option, but you should probably use an NTP server.

4

That’s the dead wiki, use NTP - NixOS Wiki instead.

But NTP is enabled by default iirc, and I’d still like to ensure their hardware clock is set sanely.

1 Like
5

the command
timedatectl
returns
Local time: Fri 2025-08-08 12:15:56 CEST
Universal time: Fri 2025-08-08 10:15:56 UTC
RTC time: Fri 2025-08-08 10:15:56
Time zone: Europe/Rome (CEST, +0200)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no

IDK, twelve years ago I used Debian and double-clicked with the left mouse button. Then for over a decade I’ve been using Windows and set the double-left click to a single middle click. I don’t want to change, especially since I’ve always had trouble with the double-left click…

6

Okay, I’ll look, but the timezone seems to be set correctly. In fact, the PC provides the exact date and time. The problem is that it sets the BIOS clock to UTC (why?), so when dual booting, when Windows starts it is two hours behind…

I set up the NTP server on my local network in the Fritz router, and all the machines get the time from there…
Anyway, I’ll look at the documentation. The strange thing is that Nixos modifies my BIOS clock…

7

Windows reads the hardware clock as local, and linux as UTC. You can set NixOs to read the clock as local with time.hardwareClockInLocalTime = true;

I haven’t tested this yet, since I’m not home, but I think it will still work, since issue #47165 hasn’t been updated

8

There doesn’t seem to be an option for this in libinput, and presumably you’ve looked through the KDE settings. You’ll likely have to do something very hacky to get this behavior, sadly. Most things I’ve seen - especially on wayland, where manipulating input is generally tricky - only support a 1:1 mapping from one key to another, not a key sequence.

9

The recommendation is to do the opposite actually:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_time#UTC_in_Microsoft_Windows

To dual boot with Windows, it is recommended to configure Windows to use UTC …
It can be done by a simple registry fix: Open regedit and add a DWORD value with hexadecimal value 1 to the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation\RealTimeIsUniversal

1 Like
10

I’ve understood changing linux would be better, because of the issue I posted earlier:

The alternative, configuring windows to use UTC, is not very well supported, and many applications that simply assume the system clock is local will just not work.

I’m not sure which is best, to be honest

11

It’s quite the opposite - putting hardware time as localtime is the “hack”, because you either have to disable NTP on Linux and boot into Windows frequently, or enable NTP on both and then have issues when you boot into Windows and back. This is more of an issue when using localtime because, e.g. if you live in a region with DST you do need to update your UTC offset, so your hardware clock will be an hour off until you boot the system that uses NTP.

I promise you, the Arch Wiki is correct here - I’ve been using Windows in UTC for 15 years, and I’ve not noticed any issues.

EDIT: and systemd itself does weird things when using hw clock as localtime:

Since systemd version 216, when the RTC is configured to the local time (rather than UTC) systemd will never synchronize back to it, as this might confuse Windows at a later boot. And systemd will no longer inform the kernel about the current timezone. This hence means FAT timestamps will be always considered UTC[1].

2 Likes
12

ok it works fine…
thank you.

13

Please consider doing what @waffle8946 suggested.

Or mark that as the solution, but I now recommend against this unsless you don’t want or can’t to change windows.

And maybe create another thread on just the middle click issue, perhaps even on a KDE forum, but I’m not sure

1 Like
14

Thanks for the reply…
For now, I prefer to force Nixos to use localtime in the hardware time…
If this causes problems in the future, I’ll try to fix them…

15

Do you all think it makes more sense to ask the double-click question in this forum or in a KDE forum?

16

You may have better luck asking in the KDE forums, since some KDE developers frequent it.