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.
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.
Seriously, it’s 2024. Everyone has to use technology now, so the software should reflect that. UX is probably one of the big barriers to widespread FOSS adoption.
No worries LibreOffice has ancestry going back to CP/M (via StarOffice) so it’s on the DOS side of things: Of course it’s the fault of the software, it’s not a Unix native program.
How? How is this terrible? Why should autosave be expected? I absolutely do not like autosave. No thanks. It is an unusual behaviour, why would anyone expect it to do this?
That said, it is really weird that it didn’t recover. I have never hard Libre office not recover from a computer outage or even a forced shutdown. That is unexpected.
You’re weird. Autosave is the norm in 2024. It’s not unusual at all, and helps in the most important of use cases; accidental non-saving. It was the norm a decade ago.
I do support challenging the software design before blaming the user, but I feel like I’m being thrown through a bit of a loop here. Autosave, while not unusual, is still the minority behaviour - surely?
I’m checking through tools I have installed and can’t find much that autosaves - even Word (tested editing a local file) doesn’t seem to autosave as far as I can tell. And, to be fair to the software, I often don’t want to overwrite the disk copy automatically (though there are some “best of both worlds” approaches, like with VSCode).
I would have sworn that autosave was enabled by default in absolutely every software that has anything to save since like the 2000s, you’re throwing me on a loop here.
As far as text editors actually, i feel like they may be constantly saving, particularly if they’re cloud-based. But i’ve been using LibreOffice for a while so i wouldn’t know. (and yes i did have to enable autosave)
Possible that we’re thinking about different features? Like for Microsoft Word, if I save a file to disk, make an edit, then exit out without saving (hitting “cancel” when it asks if I want to save) the disk copy is left untouched. That’s how the most tools work as far as I’m aware. It does have crash recovery (which may or may not work better than LibreOffice’s crash recovery, no idea).
Some editing software will use a copy of your file as extended memory, so it is always caching to disk. That can be slow, so some don’t do it for small files. I am thinking of Linux tools like vi and vim.
No it isn’t.
And in the case of Word and Excel it only is enabled if you have One Drive, Office 365 subscription, or Sharepoint Online. And all of that started in 2023. Google Docs auto saves - which follows the pattern of needing to deal with state changes since the document is not local.
None of my local apps auto save. Some do auto recovery, but they are temp files until closed. This is not the norm in 2024.
What you refer to as auto recovery is what I mean as auto save. Even your email clients do it. I will concede if you can see the value of auto recovery.
Ok but what’s your argument against autosave? You haven’t made one?
Autosave has screwed me over many times. Not all changes I make need saving. Not all drives are always present during a save.
I have worked up what if scenarios and had it auto save, and now the document is missing the original.
I prefer to manage my own revisions.
Yea same here, I see autosave as a side effect. I want to be in control of my increments
Lol she didn’t do anything. It was the op doing his daughter’s work for her that didn’t save it.
That’s the most troubling part of this story, that the op doesn’t insist their child learn how to type. I’m wondering how much of their other work they do for her.
Libre office is open source, btw. If it’s so poorly designed op can go and fix it.
Whether or not OP can fix it hinges on much more than “if it’s so poorly designed”
People have said “I lost everything because of Microsoft Word.” “I lost everything because of Wordpad.” “I lost everything because of Notepad.” You guys probably blame schools for not teaching your kids how to laundry, taxes, or change a tire.