This time of the year, clocks spring forward and fall back across the globe, but some places are making permanent changes – and Ubuntu needs to keep pace.
Over recent weeks, Canonical has refresh Ubuntu’s system time zone database package tzdata on all supported releases to ensure the system reflects the local time in parts of Canada, where:
- British Columbia moved to UTC-07 (seven hours behind UTC) for good on 9 March 2026. Clocks would’ve been falling back an hour at the start of November to UTC-08.
- Northwest Territories moved to UTC-06 for good on 21 August 2026. Folks there would’ve been moving clocks back to UTC-07 at the start of November, but now stay put.
- Manitoba moved to UTC-05 for good on 31 October 2026, the day before clocks were due to drop back to UTC-06. Like the rest, the time sticks on what it was, no change.
The system needs to show the right time for obvious reasons (alarms, calendar alerts, knowing when you need to go to bed), but some apps and tooling rely on the tzdata package when trying to calculate times and offsets.
Thus, it’s helpful even if you’re not in one of the updated locations currently as you may be travelling there at some point, adding a calendar event with someone who is and so on.
Canonical says some tooling relies on International Components for Unicode (ICU), which is provided by the tzdata-icu package on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and later, but included in the tzdataupdate on 20.04 and 22.04 LTS systems.
You don’t need to do anything to get the changes, other than install system updates. They began rolling out a few weeks back, and will have reached most systems by now (though users on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will need the ESM add-on to receive them).
The tzadata updates will also be available to users on other Linux distributions like run atop a supported Ubuntu LTS based, like Linux Mint, ZorinOS and Pop!_OS.