I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: switching to UTC+0:30 will put a large number of countries in a common time zone without them deviating from their solar time too much.
That makes me wonder of the little adaptions they need, that we Minute-Zero-ians ;) don't notice... do many Indian desktops have world clocks, for example?
I just had a look through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets, because I thought it was just India and some obscure little islands - but some fairly substantial countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, Sri Lanka) also have non-whole-hour time zones.
Has someone calculated the optimal unique timezone for the EU given population distribution and the goal to minimize the sum product of number of people and solar time difference?
If I've done the math correctly (and this was very quick and dirty) you get something like +0:40 / 10 degrees E, roughly the longitude of Hamburg or Milan. Ultimately there's gridded population data that could be used to get a better answer but I suspect it's in this neighborhood.
It’s not a troll post, I’m very serious: UTC+0:30 corresponds to the solar time at the geographical midpoint of the continental EU. The advantages are legion.
Time zones are arbitrary and the result of a historical accident. If the standardisation of timekeeping were to have happened in Amsterdam (not unlikely seeing the history of telescope development[0]) the issue would have been moot as UTC would be what is now UTC+0:19:32.13.