Recently I noticed that the clock of my laptop was off by around 6 minutes for reasons beyond my comprehension. Besides being irritating in general, it also caused trouble with a variety of applications and services.
The Date and Time settings of the Cinnamon desktop environment didn’t offer any fix to the problem besides manually setting the time. Since manually setting the time would mean to adjust the clock every time I moved between time zones, I tried to find another way to keep my computer in sync with network time.
The solution was to manually call ntpdate to force an update of the local clock.
Using one of the NTP server pools of ntp.org, the forced synchronisation can be called like this:
sudo /usr/sbin/ntpdate 0.us.pool.ntp.org
After the forced update, the Cinnamon Date and Time settings are set back to Europe/London with the correct local date and time, but the settings can easily be adjusted without changing the now correct time.