No No NO! You shouldn’t touch the clock or the timezone. Its set to UTC intentionally. Anything else will harm your anonymity.
Ubuntu is bad for privacy and software freedom. Please use a Debian custom VM if you must but usually there is no reason to use this over a Whonix Workstation VM that includes many privacy and security enhancements that vanilla distros lack.
As for your connection problems that is a general support topic that’s not impacted by the hypervisor you run. Moving.