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.
I grew up in that different time too, but I completely agree with the person you’re replying to.
Auto save is a must. No arguments. You can have personal preferences and behaviours that make you want to disable autosaving and control your saves manually, that’s perfectly fine, but that’s you and your preference. A modern application should absolutely have autosaving enabled by default. Anything else is user unfriendly and indefensible.
No. I disagree. I should be in control. I do things at times that I do not want saved. If you have auto save then the only way is with historical commits.
Auto save has fucked me over too many times. Leave it off.
The ONLY way I can see us both being satisfied is to start each document with a save location and asking save, or auto save on the first save.
Nothing is stopping you from being in control. You can turn auto save off and set things up any which way you like. People have different preferences.
And yes, an application should absolutely ask for a file name and save location on document creation - that’s just good UX. Asking for those details when the user is ostensibly about to finish working is not helpful.
Oh for what it’s worth, I probably agree more with the fact that autosave should be on by default but also possible to disable.
But yes, I do have my preference and I admit it is just that, a preference.