Linux Mint Mate upgrade to 21.3 installer breaks internet time syncing.

[T-2]

I am not sure if this is the right place to post this but I accidentally discovered a bug in the Linux Mint Mate upgrade to 21.3 installer.

One of my machines I updated a few weeks ago all of a sudden could not connect to the internet. Something about system clock not correct. I checked and sure enough instead of a March 2024 date it showed Nov 21 2023. I corrected the date and then access to the internet was restored.

Further investigation showed that the update removed the ntp service but did not install the timesyncd service. I have now confirmed this on two other machine upgrades. Once I installed the timesyncd service the clock stays up to date. So far the first one was a laptop and the other 2 are newer desktops. I suspect I will find this to be true for the rest of the desktops I am responsible for. The two newer machines were only off by 20 to 30 seconds so I would have not noticed the problem on them for a while.
The laptop was actually a 2013 Chromebook converted to Linux Mint a while back when they stopped updating it. I suspect the user ran the battery down and the machine powered off. After recharging the clock was really off.

[T-2]

Update on this. I found 6 more of my Linux Mint Mate 21.3 systems that had the same problem and one that did not. The one that did not did not have ntp installed before the upgrade - I.E. no leftover ntp.conf file. All the rest did. In the past we used ntp to sync to the networks router so all the machines had the same time.