My daughter lost her social studies essay because LibreOffice doesn't have autosave on automatically.
This is about the most recent version of LibreOffice on Windows 10. I can't speak for other versions.
My daughter worked hard on her social studies essay. I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write… but I didn’t remember to manually save her social studies essay yesterday, and for some reason the ThinkPad rebooted, LibreOffice crashed and we lost the whole thing... because autosave was not automatically on when I installed it.
No, recovery didn't work. We just got a blank file.
I rewrote it for her based on the information we had and what I remembered and tried to make it sound like what a 13-year-old would write because it was basically my fault and she did do the work. I did have her sit with me as I wrote it in case she didn’t like something I wrote, but it was sort of cheating. I'm okay with that cheating since I know she worked hard on it.
First, though, I went into the settings and turned on autosave.
I like LibreOffice, but why the hell is that not on automatically? Honestly, I don't really understand why someone wouldn't want their documents autosaved, but I'm pretty sure most people would want that.
This isn't fucking 1993. I shouldn't have to remember to save a document anymore and it shouldn't be lost forever because of it.
Like I said, I like LibreOffice. I don't really want to trust documents to Microsoft or Google. But this was really annoying.
Us older folks automatically hit save every few minutes. But not saving days worth of work is asking for trouble.
I'm feeling old right now, thx
I even impulsively hit Ctrl+S when writing comments on Lemmy once in a while
You have to hit Ctrl+S 3 or 4 times in a row, just in case too.
This is how I play Pokemon yellow. Save game? Better save again just in case.
I sometimes ctrl+S on my web browser.
So did you want this as an .htm archive or what)
me too, but it's beacuse that's the emacs keybinding for incremental search
I tend to hit ESC :w
I was going to say, it was absolutely drilled into our heads to save after every paragraph.
My high school teacher would occasionally flip the breaker for the computers in the school computer lab just to give those of us with bad saving habits a hard reminder.
Your teacher would probably get raked over the coals for traumatizing the kids if she did that now
Meh, only the Libreoffice kids
Nah more for corrupting some of the computers storage drives.
Young folk who have lost hours of progress in robotics programming projects too... Once is enough to learn your lesson. The inevitable second time is traumatizing. By the third time, you hit Ctrl+s five times after every paragraph.
I don’t think OP’s kid is gonna learn the lesson here. Sounds like Dad was handling the typing for her, and then when things screw up he’s blaming others for it. Not a good environment for a kid to learn in.
That was my sense too. OP isn't letting his kid learn the hard lessons for themselves.
Also what kind of an excuse is it to say she sucks at typing? With practice she will improve, so let her do her own homework
If only computers could automate repetitive tasks. Oh, well.
If only people understood the tradeoffs with automation
Auto save with Google Docs style snapshots has so little overhead I'd hardly consider it a trade-off. We have insane amounts of disk storage and extremely reliable non-volatile memory. The only reason against it that I can conceive of is confidential data you don't ever want to exist outside of volatile memory.
All modern word processors use auto save and it kinda blows my mind libre does not do this.
They can. Just have to turn the autosave on. Better to manually save still just in case
I still do this regularly while using Google docs even though I don’t think it has any effect.
I am an older folk. I grew up with an Apple II. I just have gotten used to autosave being on automatically in pretty much every word processor I've used since probably the mid-1990s. I just can't imagine why they decided to not have it on when you install it.
I think your memory might be failing on this, because we’re about the same age and autosave wasn’t really a common feature in the 90s. MacOS didn’t introduce autosave until OSX Lion in 2010, and Microsoft’s auto-recover (which was their only feature even close to autosave until office365) wasn’t introduced until the 2000s and didn’t work properly until 2007.
Fair. I could very well be misremembering. I don't have the greatest memory.
You should have hit Ctrl + S more throughout life.
If only it were that easy.
It does for me, but I’m autistic.
I can literally decide “I’m gonna remember this thing” and then push it into my brain in a way that I know it’ll be there forever.
It happens to me more and more these days as well.
Never assume something works until you've verified it. And even then assume it'll break some time
I mean, yes, but also it's a fair assumption to make that autosave would either be on or the fact that it was off would be communicated.
A fair assumption maybe, but not a safe one.
What word processors? Even Microsoft office doesn't have autosave on by default unless you're working off of One Drive/Share Point online.
Why would you switch to different software and assume it works the same as another?
Yep, my thoughts exactly… my company doesn’t want us to use OneDrive because of some security fears, so none of our work has autosave. Just because it’s 2024 doesn’t mean everything has autosave. Even working in a browser doesn’t always have autosave, I use some online programs daily that you have to remember to Ctrl + S.
the only time i ever lost a paper/document (at 13, for social studies), was on an apple IIc. then i rewrote it. i cried A LOT.
it has never happened since, and writing is a significant part of my job. i learned the hard way.
Agreed. It's standard practice now. At the very least LibreOffice should ask you on document creation if you want it on.
There's no reason to create the extra work of the past unless you are specifically making a nostalgia product.
Different generational audiences expect different UX about their software, as this topic has aptly shown.
I'm sure there's a bunch of people who would be pissed off at the fact that they only want to control when a save happens (by default), and not the app.
Personally I would expect it to be on automatically (normal modern UX), but also after I've written big blocks of very important text I'd do a manual save, as I don't know where in the interval cycle between automatic saves I would be at (when's the next autosave happening). Best of both worlds, basically.
Finally, only because I'm talking to you right now, as far as you and your child goes, only you as their parent knows what's best for them.
Take heart that if you're trying, you're already halfway there, as many parents don't even bother.
And don't take the negative downloading you're getting on this topic as a criticism of your parenting skills, aholes on the Internet trying to keep the world exactly how they expect it to be from way back when, and are so hung up on responsibility to a fault, are not the best sources for knowledge on how well or poorly you're doing as a parent.
I as well. Still have fun memories of loading Choplifter into my Apple via a cassette tape recorder.
Thanks much.
Also, I'm going to have to go play Choplifter now!
I'm 28, do that too. Though maybe that's what you meant by older.
No, whippersnapper, that's not what I meant ;)
And “save as” every few times (or every time if the document is important).
I lost a lot of work hours once because I was using a program that saved a backup copy every time you saved (so that you'd always be able to recover the previous version), and the damn thing crashed while saving, thus corrupting both the save file and the backup. Never. Again. Hard drive space is less expensive than my time and what's left of my mental health.
I worked as a kitchen designer and for each customer’s meeting I’d made a new file with everything the same except the date in the filename. So worst case I’d lose a day’s work.
Few minutes? For me its every few seconds
I'm barely an adult and I do this. I think it's less your age, and more the type of programs you tend to use—ei. programs where you may not want things auto saved, for me game engine, but there's plenty of examples.
"Us" don't do anything, but we do.
There are free 10 finger typing classes online. Frankly it's a bit fun, similar to learning an instrument! I did one during downtime at work because I was a 6/7 finger typer, and always had to look for numbers or punctuation other than . , ! ?
It doesn’t take any money at all to learn touch typing: just google “learn to touch type” and there’s Mavis Beacon type software just written in js, totally free.
All that’s required is the discipline. If OP’s daughter sits with it 5 minutes a day she’ll be able to touch type in no time.
Learning as young as possible is the right move.
Mavis Beacon haha. For something not ancient, https://www.typingclub.com.
Hardly how file saving works. Else you could say the same about a bit of bad luck for the computer to crash while pressing ctrl-s, corrupting the perfectly-good file saved on disk.
Too many people on this thread seem to see autosave and ctrl-s as two different things, governed by magic and mystery, one of them indispensable to conside nyourself an experienced computer user. It's the same fucking piece of code, in one case invoked by a timer, in the other one by the end user pressing a key combo.
Op's issue was that automated was disabled by default. Obviously autosave doesn't work it it's disabled.
or instead of throwing more data/money at Big Tech try one of the self hosted instances of https://nextcloud.com/office/ or https://cryptpad.org/
This makes op a bad parent. Know this first op... The luxury of autosave is the least of your worries.
It doesn’t make them a bad parent. They are just making a poor choice out of what I assume is good intentions.
Everyone learns compulsive ctrl-s eventually.
Side note : You say she's a bad typist so you type it for her. But how exactly is she going to learn how to type then?
Maybe just let her do things poorly and learn
Maybe just advise her to learn piano. Does wonders to one's typing habits.
As I told someone else, I let her do it when it isn't a long essay. With an essay, it would literally take hours.
Ignoring that this would get faster with the practise of typing it themselves:
How quickly are people writing essays these days? I'm a decently fast typer and it always took me a couple of hours to write a whole essay at that age. Once I was a few years older and was diligent in drafting a really good outline first I'd maybe get it to under a hour at the computer, but the speed of typing was never the bottleneck.
All it takes is a few minutes to give chatgpt a good prompt and the copy and casting to the text document. 🧐
Again, it can take her a full minute to type a sentence. She is an incredibly slow typist. This is really the first big essay she's ever had to write and I wanted her to think about what she wanted to say, not hunt and peck for ages.
Look, maybe you don't have kids. Maybe your kids are good typists. My kid has just started down this road of writing real essays and I have decided that typing speed is far less important than critical thinking when it comes to her education. You are free to make your own parenting decisions, but I would appreciate you not questioning mine, especially when you are not able to see the full picture when you don't actually know either me or my child.
While I won't debate your decision, please be sure that 1. You recognize how rediculously important learning to type properly is for today's kids, and 2. That she may not want to learn, and is slow because of it. She may need a reward system, and a defined set time to learn. Good luck, and I hope it goes well for you.
Critical thinking is a high level skill. High level skills must be built on top of low level skills, and people learn thing better when they write themselves. The mechanics of putting the words to paper are an important part of the WRITING process.
I found with the few 'public speaking' presentations I did during school, writing down what I was going to say made me more diligent about information/points to bring forward and what phrasing to use. I suspect all this time spent on one specific thing greatly helped commit the topic to memory and by the time of presentation I didn't need to rely on prompts to get my point across.
Are you going to type her emails and reports when she goes to work some day?
No?
Only the long ones?
Do you think maybe it might be better, if she is going to write an essay at her age, for her to think about what she is going to say and put it in a comprehensible and logical way than slowly typing things out letter by letter so that each sentence takes over a minute and she can work on her typing skills in other ways which require less creative thought?
No. All the other kids in her class are typing their own essays. Why isn't she?
Which other kids would those be? She's in online school.
And, as I said to the other person, feel free to do what you want with your own kids, but I feel that when my child is writing one of the first essays she's ever written, her ability to think about it critically is, in my opinion, far more important to her education than hunting and pecking on a keyboard for hours rather than think about it.
I think that if writing takes a lot of effort it naturally makes people think more about what they’re going to write.
That's a very neurotypical way of looking at the world.
As a side note, typing well isn't something that can easily be learned by simply typing more. If her typing is a concern (and it may well be since she'll be typing much more in college), it may be helpful to search for some typing courses. My impression is that there are some free online ones, but I don't remember any off the top of my head.
I never truly learned to type, though I had a few weeks instruction in school, and did a few levels of Mario Teaches Typing when I was a kid. None of it really stuck, and typing remains an exercise in hand-eye coordination for me. I topped out at around 70-80 WPM if I'm composing rather than copying, but that's been good enough for a lifetime of office jobs, and certainly for writing school essays. There is definitely a lower ceiling if you don't get proper instruction, but simple practice is still helpful.
Perhaps, but that's a relatively spectacular case. If my memory serves me correctly, the average typing speed is around 40 wpm. And sure, that kind of speed can get the job done but it definitely won't be a good time. My elementary school was pretty forward-thinking in this respect. They signed us up for computer literacy and typing courses that would last for multiple years that we would do in computer class. I think everyone in my class was hitting at least 50 wpm by middle school. I was typing a solid 70 wpm.
Anyways, I think there are certain aspects of typing where having guidance could really help. I know people who chicken-peck because that's just how they've always done it and they've never broken that habit.
Then let it take hours. That’s how you learn. She’s not going to learn to remember to save regularly if you just sweep the mistake under the rug and do the heavy lifting for her the second time around.
When I was learning Dvorak, I decided I would use it all the time. Even if it took me hours to write an essay. I now type 120 wpm. Practice works.
The only way I learned how to type growing up was from instant messaging my friends. All of those ridiculous typing programs didn't help. One random thing that might help is a different keyboard, or, different profile keycaps!
I love me some mechanical keyboards and I like the tactile feedback from "brown" switches. The last one I built I found out about the wonderful world of keycaps, specifically keycap profiles. I fell in love with MT3s as they are a little "cupped". My fingers sort of fall into the scoops and get enough tactile feedback to stay on the key and they just feel nice. I haven't looked at cheaper membrane keyboards in years, but I remember you could pull off the keycaps and put different ones on those, but I have no idea how they are now.
If you are interested in mechanical keyboards, you can usually buy a sample kit that has all of the different switches and you may be able to find something similar for keycaps.
I guess what I am trying to say is a different keyboard, or even keycaps, may help her learn. Though I do realize that this stuff is expensive too. As someone who is on a keyboard everyday, it became a tool to invest in.
https://drop.com/buy/drop-mito-mt3-cyber-custom-keycap-set
No need to go crazy with the first one. That first step from laptop keyboard or membrane pack-in is the biggest jump you'll ever make in typing experience. a brown-switch gamer board with the RBG turned off and some cheap Amazon "CSA" style keycaps might be all you'd ever need. Of course, even that type of thinking can lead to certain... rabbit holes.
Just want to say, what a good parent for actually giving your child a hand in school work. The work load has become so insane for children.
Thank you, although in my case, it's required. My daughter is in online school. It's a public school run by the state, not a private school, so she has real classes with real licensed teachers via live videoconference and the assignments are graded by the teachers. They require a parent to be a 'learning coach.' Mostly to keep the kid on track.
But I also know my daughter has very little patience for bullshit, as I did I when I was her age, so when they say things like "to learn about biological cells, draw a picture of an imaginary factory and show the different parts of the factory and label how they work" (an actual assignment) and it isn't being graded, it's just busywork, I tell her we can skip it. I wish I had someone who let me skip that nonsense. Like you said, the workload, or in this case the expected workload is insane. And most of it isn't conducive to learning. Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn't going to help you learn what mitochondria are.
Meanwhile, she's getting better grades than she did when she was in public school. It's working out pretty well.
That sounds like it's an exercise meant to get the kids thinking about a multi-faceted system existing inside a single structure, with parts that are interconnected but distinct, and will lead into a common metaphor teachers use to teach about biological cells. Not being graded means they're not judging the kids on what they know or don't, but want to evaluate where they are with this sort of thinking and figure out what they will focus on. Also, your kid may be smart and already know where they're going with this, but others in the class may not. If she does, she could probably knock that out in fifteen minutes. Even if you decide that she doesn't need to do it, I don't think it's stupid busy work, at least not necessarily.
Some teachers are dumb; we need too many of them and pay them too little for each and every one to be a superstar. The ones coming up with curricula and lesson plans usually aren't, though.
Oh that sounds like a much better situation. I only found out public online schools were an option in my second to last year of high school, when the bullshit work load had already been waning. Doing it mostly online now for college and it's so much less stressful. Wish you both luck. 🤞
While I can understand you wanting autosave on in your situation, I much prefer autosave off because I often open files to see what is in them and do not want to automatically modify them just because I accidentally hit a key and delete it. Automatically changing stuff is a choice you should have to make, not a feature that I have to race to disable.
Exactly. I don't want my computer doing things without me telling it to. If I want it to save the file I will tell it to save the file. If I don't tell it to save the file, I most definitely don't want it to save it behind my back. Auto save is an anti-pattern, especially if it overwrites your manual save files.
(Saving an independent recovery file, preferably including undo and redo history, might come in handy in case of crashes, sure, but it should be optional and never on by default, out of privacy concerns; other users might use the computer, and it's safer to assume that the previous user might not want others to see the documents they had open last time.)
I work with 365 and have to create docs from yesterday's version (or last weeks etc) all the time. Auto save can be a real pain in the arse.
Turn it off, save as , oh hell auto save is back on...
Just mark it as final then. This whole thread is infuriating. People working themselves into pretzels with their misguided reasons for not wanting auto-save when they really just don't know to use the software.
OP is right. I use Office 365 and haven't lost work on a document in over 10 years. Auto-save absolutely should be the default.
Or not trusting autosave because they lost a document once in the 80s when autosave didn't exist, and now they tell everyone to compulsively press ctrl-s because software can be trusted enough to drive a car, but not save a file every minute or so. Bonus point when they introduce themselves as I'm a software developer..
Yeah so maybe when we trust software to drive cars, then we can talk about trusting autosave.
What freaks me out is when I open a file, make no changes, go to close it, and I get “Do you want to save the changes you made?”
Yes. Like many here, I’ve learned to hit save A LOT. But I also want to decide when the time is right. Whether I’m writing a paper, coding, photo retouching, whatever, I flail around and experiment while working. I want to lock in my changes when I’m happy with the progress. If something goes awry I’d rather resume at the last manual save than some other weird thing I did afterwards.
The most mildly infuriating thing about this post is a parent not letting a child do their own work because they would do it slowly. I've read all the responses, clearly OP is not willing to reflect on what others are telling him. I just feel sorry for the child whose peers are getting practice in basic life skills that she won't have the opportunity to because her dad thinks he knows better than her teachers and the curriculum. His own ego is so wrapped up in his child writing a good essay and showing 'critical thinking' that he's not letting her do her own work. He admits to cheating. Just a wretched situation that I hope turns around when another adult steps in or his child gets old enough to tell him to back off.
Never trust autosave. Everything from notepad to Visual Studio gets the Ctrl+S treatment when something is updated.
I wouldn’t have learned to type if a teacher hadn’t lied to me and told me that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to high school unless I could pass a basic typing test. It enraged me at the time when I found out, but it was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me in the long run.
My mom was like you, well intentioned and getting involved a lot, to my detriment. I’ve never been able to get across to her that I would have been better off as an adult if I’d been allowed to struggle and accept consequences more as a kid. This became extremely apparent to me when I went to boarding school as an older teen, and had to catch up fast to my more self reliant peers. Getting away from people going overboard to help me was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I watched the same pattern play out with a lot of other students who had overly loving parents. The road to hell can be paved with good intentions.
Typing things for your kid is like reading things for your kid—it is such a fundamental skill that not being forced to reach your potential in it will massively change your life for the worse. My mom was a teacher for over 20 years, and the three biggest factors in success were reading ability, reading comprehension, and typing (as the modern form of writing). None of those skills are going to be obtained with anything other than exposure, practice, and time. You can give someone tools for practicing, but you can’t do the practicing for them.
I saw in your comments that your daughter has a learning disability, but all of this still stands. She will be judged against her peers as an adult, regardless of her diagnosis, so it’s best to start finding ways to work with it now.
On the other hand.. consider if your cat had walked over the keyboard before it rebooted and replaced it all with
hhhhgggggggggggggggggggghgfbefore it auto saved and replaced the document. Would you still be an advocate for auto save?It sucks to lose work, but this is clearly a user error.
UXD would state that this is a software design issue, and not user error. The software should be designed with crashes and "lost" user data in mind.
That is true. I could've sworn LibreOffice had a recovery mechanism similar to MS Office after a crash.
Even LibreOffice can only recover what has been saved. And if autosave is off, there might be less to recover than desirable. Again, that's a UXD problem.
To be fair, you could just delete the faulty part or click on Undo, and just save again.
Didn't wanna say it but yeah, 100%.
Also I was kinda suspicious of the simultaneous claim that the PC randomly restarted and LO crashed. And there's no recovery file. But that's probably just me. For all the faults Windows has, failing to catch programs with unsaved work when restarting isn't one of them I've ever experienced.
I don't have a cat and we did this out at a cafe, so yes, I would still be an advocate for it. I think that most people do not have that issue even if they have a cat.
Can confirm, have a cat and don't have that issue. Because I lock the screen when leaving the machine unattended.
ThE sCrEeN sHoULd AuToMaTiCaLly LoCk
This is an insane scenario: my software design decision is, despite recovery mechanisms like previous versions, file history, and undo mechanisms, I'm afraid if a cat uses a keyboard I'll accidentally save changes I don't want to a word document.
Lol. The only user error was choosing libre office instead of a user friendly software stack that has reasonable defaults and r recovery mechanisms.
Yup. The fear is input that wasn’t intended to be saved, being saved.
Your inability to comprehend the scenario doesn’t erase it.
You realise if it's saved you can now use features that are built into the software, that get saved, like using 'track changes' to accept or discard edits granually. You have file system level version control to choose previous versions, you have an undo feature built in. Three different tools to use.
Auto-save can usually create a new save with a timestamp, every time it saves. It´s called incremental auto-saves.
I’ve never seen this feature
That's why I lock my machine before walking away. That's + L for those who don't know.
Command-option-Q on mac
CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S
Shit, did I save yet?
CTRL+S CTRL+S CTRL+S
I don't fuck around, that's how I play my games too!
3 take aways from this that I hope you'll get:
Unless she is has some sort of disability, you typing for her just seems like enablement.
This is the most classic case of “safety feature makes people unsafe” I’ve ever seen.
This kind of thing didn’t happen before auto save, because everyone knew to save.
The responses have classic “I run Arch” energy. It’s never the fault of the software. It’s always the fault of the user. Ignore them. This is terrible UX and should be criticised. She did absolutely nothing wrong.
This thread is absolutely terrible. I’m very sorry op. As a software dev, I think I’ve hit the save button maybe ten times in the past 2 years. You are right that it should auto save by default. That’s just required in this day and age. People saying they don’t want auto save because they don’t want cats losing their work literally do not understand how auto save works in the vast majority of modern systems. A simple example is Google sheets, where you can literally see every change made to every character in every file throughout time. You’re not going to lose anything. Software devs solved this in their own tools literally decades ago. My job is literally editing text files all day long. I can’t remember the last time I lost data due to a crash or a cat or anything.
Some people even mention LaTeX which literally has a solution with Overleaf. If software doesn’t autosave in this day and age, it’s shit software.
What you have here is another case of Linux users jumping to defend the only things they have to defend, even if it’s absolute shit.
So in unrelated news I had to replace a keycap because... yeah.
First of all, as a time honored tradition it is customary to say this: Never, ever trust an autosave. Manual saves and backup, always.
With that out of the way, yeah, libre office is kinda bad at the regular user stuff. If you aren't a fiddler who goes through options first and sets their own personal preferences, a bad time will be had.
Also, apparently crashes might reset the auto save tick depending on the version used, so check twice if it happens again just to make sure.
Ps: Never had an issue with it personally, but it's hit or miss with its users.
Oh just fucking great. Thanks for telling me that. I think I might just try a different office suite.
You can always try OpenOffice if libre office isn't working out for you. It has all the same suite options as libre office. I think it has auto save by default. I haven't used it in a while though.
Unpopular opinion: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint are free on the web. Yes, you need a Microsoft account. Would it be ideal to use a FOSS product? Maybe. But schools and workplaces have a preference for Microsoft Office, so the specific skills in that office suite are going to more easily translate to real world situations, and there will be a lower chance of compatibility issues when sharing documents with other people or organizations, in either direction.
i wouldnt push excel hard here on the web. its still pretty fragile/full of incompatibilities to the point i cant use it in my day to day, i have to open the local application.
That’s fair, but it stands to reason that if a Microsoft web product isn’t super compatible with its own desktop product, a third party would be less so.
They’re free on desktop as well. Microsoft would so much rather you learn and love their tools that they’re happy to let you use them for free because it means you’re going to keep using them as an adult / professional / senior. My parents will never leave Excel / Word / Outlook because it’s what they know and love and they’re happy to pay for it in perpetuity.
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Newer versions don't have the issue.
For smaller docs try Abiword. If you are a KDE user, Calligra is nice.
Abiword is okay for now, I guess, but it's basically a zombie, waiting for dependencies to break:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=412196
Maybe we'll see orgmode format take the place in the sun it deserves
I've worked in IT and software development for 25 years, and this is literally the first time I hear someone say this, never mind call it a 'tradition' to say it.
You worked in IT, not with IT. You made the bugs, but didn't experience them.
Your tradition is having users calling you for the dumbest of things and everyone you know calling you to fix their electronics.
We are not the same.
I don't know what you're driving at, but whatever you think you know about what I've done and what I've seen, it's not nearly as much as you think you know. I work with IT, with software as much as I work in those fields. I experience bugs as much as anyone. I've seen the contempt many software devs and professionals have for regular, non-technical users so many times, it manifests in their attitudes, their documentation, their responses to GitHub tickets, their UX decisions.
I don't care if we are the same or not. Don't make assumptions you can't corroborate.
You are correct. And yet, I feel I must send a "whatever you think you know about what I’ve done and what I’ve seen, it’s not nearly as much as you think you know" right back at you, random internet acquaintance.
I didn't make any assumptions about what you know or do, aside from what you think you know about me.
Nothing you say is wrong but best practice is to constantly save regardless of auto... we've all been fucked by this in the past.
Sadly she had to learn the hard way, as I remember when writing exam papers my rhythm went something like this:
Type type Ctrl+s ... Type type Ctrl+s ... Type type Save as on USB ... Type type Ctrl+s ...
I've got ctrl+s hard-coded into me early on. Every paragraph I'll save.
I do miss hitting save and looking over at the floppy light to make sure it's updating haha.
Type type save... :looks over for spin click click blinky: ... good...
She didn't lose her essay because the software didn't autosave, she lost her essay because she didn't save!
On the upside, doing the same essay again is so much easier and usually comes out way better.
Having cut my teeth on MS-DOS 3.0 in a 4.77MHz PC with a monochrome monitor, two floppy drives and no hard disk, it was drilled into me early to save, save, save. It's just muscle memory for me now.
Writing a whole paper without saving is unimaginable to me.
First thing you teach someone who is going to use a computer, is to save the document every 4 minutes. Who knows when the power will go out... But I am sorry for her essay, and thanks for telling me that autosave feature is disabled by default. I would have never known.
and make sure you press Ctrl+S at least five times every time you want to save. I swear it sometimes doesn't work the first time.
What is wrong whit your computer and why do you say that others should press ctrl-s five times like we were practising magic? Report a bug with the software that you use if it doesnt work, or replace your keyboard
I'm just joking. It's a common habit software developers have for some reason.
You can set VSCode to autosave pretty much every keystroke. you should be able to do that for all office apps too IMO
This is user error. Everyone knows to save.
Not really, autosave has been a thing for so many years at this point
So has automatic braking in cars.
Many people still drive older cars due to costs and environmental factors, meanwhile there's no real reason to use an old version of a word processing software unless you really want to due to nostalgic reasons. And automatic braking doesn't even exist on every new car...
/s
I agree and disagree at the same time.
I agree, people should learn how to use technology.
I disagree, technology should be easy to use.
to be fair, word doesn't autosave either (unless you're using onedrive)
Autosave should always be seen as a back up option that covers unexpected closes or whatever. It shouldn’t really be a thing to rely on as the main option.
You never have to worry about a document saving if you make sure it’s actually saved by manually saving before closing.
At the risk of being that asshole who tells a parent how to raise their child based off a single post online, how do you expect her to become a better typist if you do it for her? She's 13, she's probably not gonna be that good at anything, she's at the age where she's supposed to be learning things (and that includes skills like typing).
Maybe I'm just projecting my own parents' shortcomings onto you, but they often just did things for me instead of helping me learn. I think I would be a better, more well-rounded human today if they had pushed me to be a bit more independent. I'm sure you're doing this out of love for your daughter, but I think you might not be doing her any favours by doing a portion of the work yourself. If she decides to pursue post-secondary education, are you still going to type her essays for her? What about if she gets a job that involves typing?
My mom used to do things for me instead of letting me learn, but only the things it would be painful for me to learn, because she couldn’t handle seeing me suffer.
She died when I was 26 years old, and it was only then that I finally started to develop some of the necessary life skills I should have been learning when I was a teenager.
Being too soft on kids is cruel because the adult pays for it so hard.
if i could parent my oldest kid again, i would let him struggle more and fail more.
the inevitable rude awakening was ROUGH.
edit - grammar
I think OP has explained that he does let her type when it's a shorter document. Which I think is perfectly reasonable at this age.
I couldn't type very well until I took a dedicated typing class at school when I was 13. By the end of the semester, I was faster than 95% of all typists worldwide. Maybe OP's kid might be interested in a class like that next year. And if not, she'll still get better over time even if she isn't typing these long essays right now.
Basically, give her (and OP) a break. They're doing fine.
Edit: also, I don't think you're an asshole for offering your input. Nothing wrong with that. It just comes off as a bit overly judgemental given OP is guilty of... occasionally typing his daughter's longer essays to save time (a finite resource that any parent has a limited quantity of).
What OP is guilty of is of losing his daughter’s essay.
Just one of the many, many, many drawbacks to having your parents do your homework for you.
OP definitely didn't "do the homework" for the kid based on the description of events. You are wildly exaggerating if you are suggesting typing the essay that the kid dictated is tantamount to doing the homework for them.
By letting her do it when it isn't a long essay.
I'd argue that you should let her type, even on a long essay. There's no shortcut to learning how to type, and unless the essay is on a tight deadline, depriving her of the learning opportunity will only delay this crucial ability.
If you're afraid that she will not be able to focus on the essay contents while typing, she can try drafting the essay up with pen on paper first.
In my experience, the longer you type, the faster you get at typing.
That's like getting into the rhythm. If you do it a little and then stop, then you never become proficient as you never got into that flow.
Try learning a guitar by pulling a few strings a day. Try learning to read in a different language by reading a few letters each time. Try running by taking a few steps.
Doesn't it sound ridiculous?
Have you ever tried learning a different language? You don't become proficient by reading one sentence, then stopping and then another one. You do it by struggling through many, and the more you do it, the faster you learn.
Note, I'm not writing this because "boohoo, bad parenting." It's the first essay, who cares. (although her being 13 does make me raise a brow. I'd expect it with a 7 y.o., but 13? w/e, you do you). I just think you have a misunderstanding in how learning core-level skills work. Continuous repetition is the key.
Another glaring example is how toddlers learn languages. In a span of a couple of years, they are capable of learning a language to native level with absolutely no prior knowledge, just by listening and trying to repeat the sounds day in and day out. Just think about it.
I work as a video editor. I have premiere pro/after effects autosave every 15 minutes but I always manually save every major changes that I make. It's automatic to me. Ctrl+s, Ctrl+s, Ctrl+s
I support Office365 in an education environment and you wouldn't believe the number of documents lost to autosave. Autosave and document recovery are definitely nice and useful to have, but they're not infallible. Shit happens and when it does, it's when you're finishing up your midterm the night before it's due.
You need to save, and save often. And if the project you're working on is "super important it's 50% of my grade" make backups. Even just saving a copy to a flash drive is better than nothing.
I might end up throwing in the towel and going with that or Google Docs, but, and I know these are just a child's school essays, I hate giving Microsoft and Google more data just on principle because who the hell knows what they're doing with all that data.
Libreoffice will likely still work fine for you, especially now that you've got autosave turned on. Heck, I have faculty that refuse to use anything other than LibreOffice, so I have it installed in our computer labs. As long as you're saving and backing up reasonably often, you should be good to go. Though your school likely has a cloud suite that you could use too. Office365 and Google Workspaces are by far the most popular. It would be integrated with your daughter's student email which I can't imagine a modern school not having. If you're not sure, contact the school and they'd be able to help you.
I'm sorry your kid lost her paper! It's always a bummer to take a call and it's a kid crying because their paper went up in smoke. If you haven't already, contact the teacher and let them know what happened. IME most teachers are reasonable and as long as "office ate my homework" isn't your go-to excuse, they'll give you an extension.
I appreciate it, thanks. It's all been sorted out now, so we can just move on and we've both learned a lesson.
In addition to the other comment, if your school has a paid O365 or Google account it’s far less likely that they’re vacuuming up your data because you’re now an enterprise account that they actually care about keeping, unlike a personal account. Even more so if it’s an account for a child, which usually requires stricter privacy controls.
Honestly though, as much much as I despise Microsoft and Google, I would never recommend anything else to my parents / family because I know they just don’t care as much as I do, and they’re not willing to learn or change anything. It doesn’t sound like you’re quite that way, but perhaps still less comfortable with something that’s not 100% rock solid. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to go with some of these paid services if it means you’re going to be happier.
The school, unfortunately, does not pay for such things. But I do understand what you're saying. The thing is I'm trying to be more responsible about that sort of thing after a long time of not being very responsible about it and when this sort of thing happens, it can be a mildly infuriating experience because it doesn't do what I would expect the commercial alternative to do, although most of the time it is not on this level because data isn't lost.
Maybe that is unreasonable of me, but it still makes me feel that way.
No I definitely get it… I’ve definitely been more than mildly infuriated when my FOSS replacement doesn’t work as well. All a journey, best of luck to you!
Thanks, you too!
What does MS say when you report these to them? Is it always the same bug still unfixed or separate issues? Nothing is infallible with software, but note that in ops case autosave was disabled so no mystery "autosave lost my document", it was just disabled.
And ffs autosave is just a timer that saves the document every x minutes the same way a user would do if they pressed save. I do believe you get many issues reported to you, but I doubt Microsoft autosave is so buggy to cause an unbelievable amount of data loss in a single institution (and I love to shit on MS).
A well-implemented autosave should save every time anything changes in the document.
Fair enough, can agree with that, replace every x minuted with at every keystroke in my precious comment
Edit: previous, but I'm leaving it like that
I teach my students to do manual save every 5 minutes. Just hit ctl+s and it's done. I basically save everytime I make a change in a project. I've learn the hard way while working on my thesis piece. Pretty much cost me 6 months of my life.
EDIT: Here is my save/backup story.
Did you edit your thesis for six months without saving?
I know people that used to rely on the document recovery in Word to save their documents. Every day they'd recover the document they wanted to work on.
Holy mother. That's like jumping in front of a train every evening and relying on the groundhog day to wake you up in your bed again in the morning.
Yeah it terrified me once I found out. Some people think of the strangest workflows. (relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/)
Lol I somehow knew it was gonna be that one
😮
lol yea this makes no sense
The story: It was a composition, score + electroacoustic piece. (music master’s). At some point, I made a backup save on an external drive and forgot to change back the save location to my internal drive. One day I was using the vacuum cleaner, the hard disk power cable got caught in the vacuum cleaner and fell out. The external drive was broken, and I realized I had been making all of my saves on it. I’ve lost months of work, had to start over the piece, and I wasn’t able to submit my piece and thesis until the following semester. Now I teach computer music and I always tell that story to my students lol.
My thesis was versioned using SVN on my server and I had a remote backup at my parents. And stored on both my laptop and desktop.
I had online backup of the written part. It was 12+ years ago so even that wasn't that common. But the main project was a composition, score + electroacoustic piece. (music master’s). At some point, I made a backup save on an external drive and forgot to change back the save location to my internal drive. One day I was using the vacuum cleaner, the hard disk power cable got caught in the vacuum cleaner and fell out. The external drive was broken, and I realized I had been making all of my saves on it. I’ve lost months of work, had to start over the piece, and I wasn’t able to submit my piece and thesis until the following semester. Now I teach computer music and I always tell that story to my students lol.
You rebel you
Because of SVN? Git was 4 years old when I did my thesis so I hadn't really heard about it.
It was a composition, score + electroacoustic piece. (music master's). At some point, I made a backup save on an external drive and forgot to change back the save location to my internal drive. One day I was using the vacuum cleaner, the hard disk power cable got caught in the vacuum cleaner and fell out. The external drive was broken, and I realized I had been making all of my saves on it. I've lost months of work, had to start over the piece, and I wasn't able to submit my piece and thesis until the following semester. Now I teach computer music and I always tell that story to my students lol.
Seems like a nice feature then would be to have a person review the save file path once every week or so.
Prompt first of course, for privacy reasons.
I bought a rooster because I don't trust my phones alarm to go off in the morning
That’s a good idea. I swear this thing is trying to get me fired.
Ok hear me out, what I'm gonna say is probably not the thing most people would like to hear but here I go:
To write things down, I use ghostwriter and it does have autosave feature. Sure, it's just a markdown writer however it's great for distraction-free writing too. You can just use ghostwriter to write things and if you still need it in an office document, you can copy-paste it into LibreOffice.
The amount of times I've fucked up my template documents for forms and had to go back and revert them because they were autosaving and I hadn't set them to read only makes me not a huge fan of autosave being on automatically. Is the problem easily solvable? Yes. Have I somehow still not gotten used to autosave even though it's the norm for like a decade at least? Also, yes. But there it is. A reason why for you.
Nah, she lost it, because your Thinkpad suddenly rebooted. Investigate that first.
And must be a distro-specific thing, it's on here by default.
Oof. I think most of us have lost work like this. I kind of think it's a rite of passage. It's how you learn to save. Good luck with the rewrite!
Sounds like she learned a lesson in the value of building the habit of doing a quick ctrl-s every minute or so, no matter what program you are using.
10fastfingers.com for your daughter. Or any of the hundreds of other games and tests and practice tools. Being able to type well is an important skill in this life that she'll need.
On auto save: it should be a trivial option that's always on and always reliably saves -multiple- copies of your work
I can't recommend OnlyOffice enough. I just did a test repeatedly killing the application and the document is recovered with the default settings.
I'll check it out. Thanks!
Learn to save often, but especially learn the limitations of the tools you have. It's not libreoffice's fault if you don't.
My daughter lost...
We lost everything...
I forgot to save...
Lol. We came this far that forgetting to save is caused by shitty software...
If you’re on a Windows PC oftentimes you can go to the user temp folder and find the working document there. %temp% in file explorer.
You might have to do a little digging to find out what/where it is, sometimes they’re nice and obvious in a folder named for the app creating it, sometimes it’s a string of nonsensical alphanumeric characters.
Also: You can go to the “Tools” followed by “Options” then go to “LibreOffice” and click on “Path”, temp and backup files are stored at the location listed there, too.
Either way, I highly, highly suggest you dig around for the lost doc in that folder. It’s saved my butt a couple times when I forgot to save.
Thank you for the help!
Good luck.
I was curious and found this thread.
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/libreoffice-writer-crash-and-autosave-is-off-by-default/92416/4
Apparently the newest version will enable auto save by default. Not sure why it wasn’t that way to begin with…
I dislike autosaves in word processors/spreadsheets etc and turn them off whenever I can. I prefer to have that control, I have had issues where I have deleted things to rewrite/update them, decide against it and close the app only to find it's overwritten what I had done....
Have you tried using file versioning, or using review (track changes) functions to propose changes so you can choose to accept edits or decide against them? It's like there are specific features for this scenario that allow you to save, have backups and have that control.
yeh, those are solutions, I was just explaining how its not automatically better.
Latex documents in git are the best option technically, but good luck getting the average person (or me!) to do that.
I don't mind auto saving in places that keep versioning. But by default for LibreOffice does sound as dangerous as not having it.
Not really, you can leave auto save on, and use the inbuilt track changes function. Best of both worlds.
Fair enough… it is impossible to make everyone happy lol.
Thinkpad spontaneously rebooting has some part in the blame here too, no? I mean that’s why this whole fiasco happened..
Thank you for posting this. I hadn't run into this problem, and now I won't.
Manual save made sense when a disk write froze the program for seconds and engaged the disk drive with sounds (which I miss a little; very reassuring) but today autosave ought to be fully expected. LibreOffice really should've had it on by default.
Manually save often. She learned the hard lesson all of us learn. I never rely on autosave anywhere. It does not always do it's job.
No Backup no pity
You lost it because you didn't save. You are a parent, it's time to take responsibility for your mistakes. Don't blame LO as if you were 13 y/o.
At work i use a $800 proprietary shit software that has a 70% chance of crashing when printing (so it crashes when job is done)
So I got used to Ctrl+S every. Single. Sentence.
Windows 10 home loves to automatically reboot to install the fucking updates IMMEDIATELY. RIGHT. NOW. And Microsoft pushed some big update just a few days ago. When LibreOffice crashes usually there's a recovery feature. It's windows. Windows wanted to install the fucking updates and it told LibreOffice to gracefully close RIGHT NOW, and NO, THE USER DOESN'T WANT TO SAVE, the user wants to get updates immediately ASAP
Btw automatically saving is a generally undesirable feature as it could reduce the lifetime of ssds, slowdown the system if the file Is big or stored on slow media like network.
No it doesn't. Maybe it can happen if you neglect to reboot your pc in ages but normally it never ever happens.
It hasn't happened to me ever and won't because I shutdown the computer at night.
So the solution to forced rebooting is to have to suffer through the ridiculous boot times for windows every day?
Sure. Linux boots faster. But boot time on Windows is still measured in seconds.
Just let Windows update occasionally.
Timeline of Windows users:
Users: Fuck you Microsoft why do I get viruses*?
MS: Okay we will give you security updates.
Users: No, I don't want to update or ever reboot, you idiot.
MS: Okay, you do you.
Users: Why do I still get viruses?
MS: How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
Users: Just fix it.
MS: Fine.
Users: Why is my computer rebooting?
*Virus in this context refers to any security problems.
I just disable windows updates so it never restarts to update
Patchday is once a month. No need to reboot every day. Also, what "ridiculous boot time"? What hardware do you have?
I mean, it sucks but it is best practice.
You have clearly never used windows in a corporate or education environment. They are nothing but cruel with the update policies
That's your IT department policy they've set, not Windows. Source: am IT and was part of implementing that type of policy at my work because users never fucking apply updates.
I don't know what kind of files you write regularly, but even the smallest and cheapest PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive can store data at 600 megabytes per second or more. That's plenty fast enough for my office documents at least. And you can rewrite the entire contents of the drive a hundred times or more before it fails. So I wouldn't lose any sleep over having autosave on.
Is this SSD failure after 100 rewrites localized? Or is it just the sum total of data saved to it that causes this? Because if it’s localized, autosave is gonna use up your 100 safe writes in the first hour.
It's the sum total. SSD's would have become the success they are today if it were localized.
Is it 2020 design, that crashed when you try to print the 3D renders?
FYI: It does have the option to save automatically:
Thanks, that's what I turned on. My problem was it wasn't on already.
You are right. Only autorecovery was on by default, but I had to manually enable automatic saving.
Some weeks ago I wrote my probabilities homework on LaTeX, every couple of lines I press F5 to compile and see how it was looking. I was pretty sure that compiling automatically saved the project, but I was wrong and lost and entire night of LaTeX work. Now I know that I need to manually save first, after that compiling save the project and the compiled pdf when F5.
I suspect losing a LaTeX doc hurt more than a 'word' doc
At least in LaTeX I'm not losing any "original toughs", I first do the exercises on paper and pen and then format it on latex to send to my professor, but I'm not really used to it, so the writing process involve a lot of looking on internet how to do things.
I think it depends. In my case, I write faster in LaTeX as the formatting is done a lot quicker. Just need to find one template I've already used and is aproppiate for the ocassion.
Although being able to take a screenshot and paste it is a huge bonus and time saver in LibreOffice when taking notes in real time.
It has been a few years (shit near 15 years) since I used LaTex, and I didn't use it that often so it wasn't ingrained. But even then it was much easier than trying to get publisher for format things
Wait, all this time I thought that LibreOffice sutosaved after doing the first manual save. Oof, how do I turn it on, just in case?
Always save first, and name the file.
Er, you lost your daughters essay because you assumed that autosave was enabled.
Make them play Fallout NV, and then
TEACH. YOUR. KID. TO. SAVE.
Never rely on autosaves for anything, ever.
Even if its on by default, first thing you should do when installing or first using it is adjust the settings imo. How often is still a matter of personal choice. And other settings are as well. Granted, I get I'm probably far from the average given how much I like to tinker with settings and customizing toolbars, etc. Still agree it should be on by default along with some basic version history to undo unwanted autosaves.
Damn, you got hit with a severe case of triple bad luck (machine, software and humanness).
As someone who thanks to you got reminded to look at their software backup settings, thanks for your sacrifice.
Bad UX design is pretty ingrained in many FOSS projects unfortunately.
Sorry you forgot to save but I don't see how this is the fault of the libreoffice community. I also think cheating isn't the right answer at all but that's not really my place.
Maybe you should do a hardware test as it is really not normal for devices to just reboot. I would start with a RAM test then move on to a stress test for a few hours.
Auto save on by default is not an unreasonable request. If they just wanted to request it, this is not the place. However, is hey wanted to vent and discuss, so this seems like the place.
I personally don't really care for autosave but I see where he's coming from. However I don't like the fact that he seems to blame a community project for his daughters misfortune. It sucks that it happened to him but I don't think its constructive to vent in this community.
I love that there are still kids learning this hard lesson in the year 2024.
LMAO blaming the software because you're too dumb to hit Ctrl + s. Presumably you're old enough to have been taught to save often. Now maybe your daughter will learn from your fuck up and actually SAVE HER WORK.
Also she's never going to learn to type well if you just do it for her. Get her Mavis Beacon for Christmas this year and stop doing her homework for her.
Jesus, mate! Calm down. Poor OP already feels like crap for losing their daughter's essay, and you level some heinous shit at both of them. Plus, they were passing on a PSA for other users of LibreOffice, in case they get caught out by the same thing.
Don't be that person.
No, I'm saying that because she worked hard on an essay she wrote, writing it again wouldn't serve any educational purpose. I rewrote it with her sitting next to me, based on what I remembered that she had written the day before, so that she could help me remember what was written.
What educational purpose would making her do the whole thing again serve?
Also... maybe meet my daughter first before deciding a 13-year-old child is a monster?
Learning from mistakes. Learning that when you screw up, you don’t get a free pass to fix your mistakes. Learning to save frequently when working on a document. I can go on and on.
You are coddling your child and I feel bad for her.
It was my mistake, not hers.
So you're saying she should learn that when someone else makes a mistake, she doesn't get a free pass to fix it?
I should punish her for something I did? And if I don't do that, I'm coddling her?
I mean I guess it's not a terrible thing to learn that the people who have power over you will fuck you over when they make a mistake, but I'd rather her not think of me that way.
You do what you want with your kids. I'd rather my child not grow up to think her father was an abusive asshole who punished her for things she didn't do or have any control over.
Look at how you’ve handled this situation so far. Seriously, step back and take a look at it.
First, we can skip the typing for her because that’s been discussed to death. But then, when you found the mistake, you immediately started typing again and even called it cheating because you were trying to sound like a 13 yr old girl. You are teaching her that using any means necessary to get a good grade is acceptable.
Next, you are trying to blame the software and not take responsibility for your mistake. This is teaching her not to take responsibility but to instead find something else to blame for mistakes.
No, you should not punish her for your mistake, but you should instead teach her how to handle mistakes.
I guarantee that this will happen to her in the future when she is typing her own work. She will get mad, blame the software, then cheat to get a good grade. This is what you’ve taught her.
I'm pretty sure I did by telling her I fucked up, apologizing and rewriting the essay. Which is what she would have been expected to do if she had fucked up.
Also, when you say I did not take responsibility for my mistake, are you not including the part of my post where I wrote:
Or did you just not read it?
I really don't understand why you think me taking responsibility for my error and rectifying it teaches her a lesson that you should cheat to get a good grade. Because as far as I can tell, you keep suggesting that I should punish her for my mistake and make her rewrite it. Otherwise, what is your point here?
Yes. You should have made her sit with you and redo the entire assignment. Not as punishment, but as rectifying the mistake as she would have had to do had she been the typist.
Treat it as a learning moment and not as punishment.
OP already made it a learning moment. He told his kid it was his fault and he'd take responsibility for it. The kid also learned her parent has humility and has her back when things go wrong.
Sure, you can go the other route and have her re-write it, but I don't think that would've been as good a learning experience for the kid. "Life sucks sometimes kiddo. Sometimes you do nothing wrong and still get saddled with extra work and strife." The kid's 13. Give em a break, Red Forman.
She already learned that lesson by watching her dad fuck up, then fix the problem with his own effort. If he made her sit down and do the whole thing over again she would've instead learned a lesson by watching her dad fuck up, then fix it by making it someone else's problem.
You mean like when I said in my original post:
First you claim I didn't take responsibility, which I did, now you're saying I should have had her sit with me, which I did.
Did you read my post at all?
And you still haven't explained to me how me taking responsibility for my mistake, apologizing for it and then fixing the problem myself teachers her to cheat in order to get a good grade. Can you please explain that?
Thanks, didn't know it had an autosave feature, but I do now. Your story is appreciated
I had a similar problem. I had made a bunch of changes to a document and just closed LibreOffice Calc thinking it would prompt me to save it. It did not. It just exited and discarded my changes. I went in that day and turned on AutoSave.
Weird, it prompts for me
It shouldn't just have autosave on automatically, it should push git commits with an AI generated summary that can be rolled back to at will...
Auto save option that isn't enabled by default is some evil design. 😬
This is clearly a layer-8-problem.
Learning how to properly save and backup is the more important lesson anyway.
This is why I do all my drafts in n++
New 12 and new 6 have savede quite a few times.
I agree. Autosave should be enabled by default.
Jesus never loses any data.
Because Jesus saves.
I'll be the devil's advocate. A little.
LibreOffice being FOSS probably means developers are mostly using it together with other FOSS. This brings some benefits, like a journaled filesystem, that sort of make the autosave useless. That recovery process that failed for you? It wouldn't have on something like btrfs or ext4 and, consequently, you wouldn't have been in a position where you're typing up this post.
Having said that, on bs OSes like windows autosave probably should be the default.
I hate Windows so much. Her school requires it for a small handful of reasons and I don't really want to fuck with getting those particular occasional use pieces of software to work in Linux, so we're sticking with Win 10 for now. I hear 11 is worse.
Technically, Office doesn't have auto save enabled unless you sync it with OneDrive or enable it in settings or GPO.
This is why I rather use something like Google docs, even though I’m not a fan of Google, it saves automatically and has a version history I can revert to.
I guess it's about what one's used to. I'd be pretty annoyed if it started overwriting my documents when I when I do not explicitly tell it to do that.
I copy something from the document, maybe hit cut instead of copy. Now it's gone from the original.
LibreOffice will be happy to fully refund the purchase price.
That could be a great learning experience. If it's an important document not only do I save regularily, I also create copies of the file at regular intervals.
This doesn't help her right now but in the future https://www.overleaf.com/ (online LaTeX) might be an option for her.
N00Bz
Yeah, foss softwares are full of these 'design flaws' for some reason. Take for exemple the 'single click to open files' that was the default on KDE for so long despite everyone reverting it back to double click.
Says who? I'm still using single click and won't go back. This is a very different choice than having autosave on by default.
First thing I do when using a new Windows computer is turn single click back on. Well, either that or show file extensions.
it is and it isn't
they're both bad UX, which FOSS is generally pretty bad at, probably because there's not as much overlap between people who who are really into FOSS and people who are really into UX
linux-centric communities also tend to be plagued by elitism, which i expect stifles a lot of this kind of thing before proper conversations can take root
It is. Single/double click behavior is a matter of preference. Autosave on is a measure to mitigate risk. Very different "UX" choices.
Edit: just adding context that the clicking behavior on executables is defined by another setting on Dolphin.
And single click drastically increases the risk of running some sketchy executable just because you selected it. Every desktop I've used doesn't do that.
It doesn't, that's another setting. By default Dolphin asks confirmation before running anything with mouse clicks. Also you can double click just as impulsively as single clicking, so it wouldn't even be a good safeguard.
Well then, you also have large documents or incriminating photos you may not intend to open.
And defaulting to the preference that most people prefer or are used to is a matter of UX.
Which is why I say they're both UX decisions.
yet very different - binning them into the same category is not helpful. Single click as default is ok, autosave off as default is probably not.
Auto save is extremely dangerous and should be off by default. Computers should never do things, especially with important documents, without the user telling them to. If the user wants to save the file, they'll tell the computer to save the file. If they don't tell the computer to save the file, they clearly don't want the file saved (if they do want it saved and expect the computer to do it for them without being told to, they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a computer, sharp objects, or open flames, as they clearly could be a danger to themselves and others).
L take. Computers have always done thousands of things in the background. Autosave does not mean "overwrite the original file".
which is why my first words to you were "it is and it isn't"
both are caused by people in the foss space not paying enough attention to ux
increased attention to ux could solve both
personally i think categorising all work solely through the lens of severity is unhelpful
risk mitigation definitely comes before preference, whether you call them both UX or not