Porteus

Despite giving time zone in boot parameter, still end up with UTC . Also tried boots with utc=yes and utc=no. No luck.

Btw is there a way of getting KDE to list it's version, info, etc from CLI?

you may try 'Time config' GUI app which you can find in PSC.
set the time first (remember to click on the 'update system clock' button) and then set the timezone with the clock in localtime.