Do you find yourself continually checking the time difference when scheduling meetings with people living in other countries? Wouldn’t it be easier to have the time in multiple timezones on your desktop? That’s where Gnome Clocks can help.
Gnome Clocks is not a task or a time manager. However, it can help us ease our collaboration with people living in different time zones. With it, you can have multiple clocks for various regions in the same window. As a bonus, you can also set up alarms and have instant access to a stopwatch and timer. Let’s see how you can install and use it in Ubuntu.
Installation
We’ve installed Gnome Clocks from the official Ubuntu’s Software app as a snap for this tutorial. You can find it there by searching for a part of its name, like “clocks.”
To install it, click on the friendly green Install button.
If you don’t like snaps or the software app, you can also bring Gnome Clocks on-board with apt:
sudo apt install gnome-clocks
After its installation, locate Gnome Clocks among the rest of your installed software and run it.
Multiple Time Zones
Gnome Clocks allows you to add many clocks so you can check different time zones at a glance. To do that, you’ll have to add each clock individually.
When you run it for the first time, Gnome Clocks will present you with its World Clocks page, devoid of any clocks.
To add a new clock, click on the button with the plus sign at the top left. Alternatively, press Ctrl + N on your keyboard. A mini window will pop up asking you to search for the city whose time you’d like on display.
There’s a little bug here, though: if you type the full name of a place, you won’t be able to add it to Gnome Clocks. The problem stands, even if you use the same syntax as Gnome Clocks suggests.
To sidestep the problem, you’ll have to type part of the name and wait for half a second for Gnome Clocks to display its suggestions. Then, choose the place you’re interested in from those suggestions. After that, the green Add button on the top right will be enabled. Click on it to add the clock to your list.
Gnome Clocks will present the name of the place on the left, the time on the right, and an icon with a trash bin on the far right, from where you can remove the particular clock.
You can add as many clocks as you wish by repeating this process. If you add so many that they don’t fit in Gnome Clocks’ interface, you’ll be able to scroll up and down to see them all.
What’s super-useful is that the app will tell you the time difference between them and your time zone under each one’s name in a natural language. Thus, in the example in our screenshot, when contacting people at Stuttgart and Toulouse, I should keep in mind they’re “one hour earlier” compared to Athens, Greece, where I live.
By clicking on a particular clock, Gnome Clocks will display it on its whole window and hide the rest. It will also show the time of sunrise and sunset at the chosen geographical spot.
Alarm and Timer
Apart from displaying multiple clocks for different time zones, Gnome Clocks also allows you to keep track of its progress through a Stopwatch and a Timer, as well as set up multiple alarms.
You can set up new alarms by visiting the Alarms tab, then adding them like you’d add clocks. Instead of searching for a city, though, you’ll have to enter when you want the alarm active.
A visit to the Stopwatch tab allows you to start counting from a specific point in time. Keep track of intermediate points in time by clicking on Lap.
If you click on Pause, you can then either resume counting or clear the current counter.
Finally, through Timer, you can set up a countdown for a specific duration in time. There are eight presets to begin counting with two clicks, but you can also manually enter your countdown period.
After the timer begins, you can pause it and, while in the paused state, resume counting, restart, or trash the active timer.
Once you have setup multiple timezones in Ubuntu, you may want to install Skype on Ubuntu so you can hold online conferencing.
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