Today I replaced the CMOS battery of the motherboard of my i7 2600K. Before I bought that computer in 2011 I had been lucky with those because they always outlasted my use of the motherboard.
Point being this mechanism at this point is planed obsolescence. I don't believe most normies would be able to change themselves, specially if it's under the GPU.

Motherboards need to have a card reader or USB dedicated so the user can load settings from a storage device, no battery needed.
I think that's the only thing ARM does better, IIRC the PI's don't have a BIOS like the x86-64 computers, but you can setup a file in the SD card that changes the equivalent of BIOS options.

@kamehamic cmos keeps time as well , it needs to stay powered. It doesn’t just store bio settings and stuff. Small spi flash storage and efi also sorta solves the problem you are talking about. We could probably make cmos batteries that last significantly longer with some sorta charge on power on function, but it’s more than just storing settings.

@technolyze @kamehamic my cmos being broken is why I can't download new packages because the time is wrong -_-

Just set it up manually. I was using that computer with the empty battery for some months. The shit hitting fan moments were when the rare instance of power going out and I had to setup the BIOS all over again.

@kamehamic @technolyze setting the time up manually doesnt seem to work for some reason it always turns out wrong

I don't know what OS are on, don't you have any kind of ntp service? I can do timedatectl

@kamehamic @technolyze oh huh I was setting the clock in the bios settings

@kamehamic @technolyze I'm on devuan

That's an option but the OS can do it too, it can be done manually there too but it also can use dedicated internet time+date servers which it automatically.

Devuan doesn't have systemd... I have no idea how that works. Check their forums/wiki I guess. Search for how to setup or start "ntp".

@kamehamic @technolyze damn

The ability to be able to remember time and date are pretty irrelevant if the computer is connected to internet, also those two settings can be set using easily obtainable references, i.e., your smartphone. Other settings on the other hand tend to be more case by case or unique. If the BIOS doesn't allow exporting them into a file, you would need to write them down or more than a few screenshots, still manual input would be required, even if it's just to load a file.

But TBH my main problem is that depending on the hardware the BIOS default settings won't be able to start the OS, e.g., it might try with the wrong storage.
>We could probably make cmos batteries that last significantly longer with some sorta charge on power on function
Yeah, rechargable CR2032 batteries exist.

@georgia @kamehamic do you set your time to local but use Linux which is expecting utc? I use ntp to sync on startup even with a working cmos battery , there’s drift.

@technolyze @kamehamic shit youre right it must be the wrong timezone or something. I never considered that