what would it take if we ran the CrOS system in UTC all the time ?  with all the security sandboxing where we run daemons with --profile=minimalistic-mountns or -P/var/empty, the target of /etc/localtime is never made visible to daemons, so they're already running in UTC.

when it comes to logging, the logging daemon itself is responsible for the timestamps (it uses the timestamp of when the message is received, not when it was sent) which is why /var/log/messages has timezone details.  if we redid logging, it seems like the UTC->localtime translation would be a UI feature rather than the datastore itself being in localtime.

iiuc, Chrome takes care of updating the timezone symlink, but it doesn't rely on that content directly itself for its UI.  Chrome instead has its own internal timezone database which is used for things like v8/JS.

are people aware of any other random places where code needs to know the timezone details and UTC wouldn't work ?