Cyber , 10 months ago

Sure

1st place to look at comparison of features (IMHO 😉) is the Arch Linux Wiki

And there’s also a good list on the Chrony site

But my brief list is:

• If you need to sync and provide time, then use ntpd.
• Otherwise, the (SNTP) client-only systemd-timesyncd is “better”, but, this doesn’t (yet?) use a DHCP NTP option and always writes to a file - not good for read-only filesystems / SD cards (source)
• For laptops / intermittent network connections, use chrony (Note: on LinuxMint, installing this removes systemd-timesyncd)

- For non-battery backed RTCs (ie Raspberry Pi), there’s also fake-hwclock

So, I go with the general theme of your article - keep it simple, don’t install multiple tools to do the same thing - but as you can see, there are use cases where I personally wish we could remove the systemd component(s) and keep the others.