KS on VM is working good, but KS on direct hardware after fresh installation always suffering of clock gab between real UTC time and KS local time with 4 hours backward in KS case, leading to broken sdwdate (but there is an internet connection).
Manual time adjustment will fix it but this is impractical.
Either fixing the issue of why its not catching up or making NTP as fallback mechanism when needed to fix itself.
There shouldn’t be any behavior difference in sdwdate when running on physical hardware as opposed to virtual hardware. Maybe your RTC is set to localtime while your Kicksecure installation expects it to be set to UTC? (I don’t know if that would cause this problem or not, but it kind of sounds plausible.)
Saw this and wanted to chime and say sdwdate from what I noticed so far will try to sync even before connected to a network. Also it appears that failure to sync when switching between live and persistent is more common. The second observation makes me wonder what mode you boot into more?
Try installing KS on external flash/hard drive fresh installation (default settings), should give you the same issue when first booting into sysmaint after installation.
I have a physical hardware Kicksecure machine that does not have these issues.
Didnt understand the question, i boot into sysmaint (persistent) if thats what you mean.
No idea, but its reproducible from my end.
Sryy what I meant is switching between modes. The behavior I noticed is the syncing of time between modes. Thus far live mode is what I use more. Time sync fails in live mode more then persistent. If I sync in persistent first before switching I don’t see a failure in sdwdate the next time I boot in live 
Yep saw this behavior, something is lacking sdwdate from connecting properly. But more importantly is the issue above, where first time fresh installation sdwdate has clock issue which will never be fixed unless handled manually.