Us older folks automatically hit save every few minutes. But not saving days worth of work is asking for trouble.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

Unless she is has some sort of disability, you typing for her just seems like enablement.

3 take aways from this that I hope you'll get:

1. Learn to save often. Sometimes that means 5x in a row just to be sure.
2. Never just assume the software is going to save you from yourself. Its OK to trust software, but you gotta make sure it does what you expect it to do. In this case, that means either checking those settings when you start out, or making sure the file exists on disk.
3. Invest in some typing games for your kid so they learn how to type properly and can do their own work! I understand wanting to help your kid succeed, but you can't do that in the long term without crippling their development.

On the other hand.. consider if your cat had walked over the keyboard before it rebooted and replaced it all with hhhhgggggggggggggggggggghgf before 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.

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.

Everyone learns compulsive ctrl-s eventually.

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.

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.

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.

She didn't lose her essay because the software didn't autosave, she lost her essay because she didn't save!

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.

Never trust autosave. Everything from notepad to Visual Studio gets the Ctrl+S treatment when something is updated.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

So in unrelated news I had to replace a keycap because... yeah.

I type things in for her because she’s a really bad typist, but she tells me what to write…

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is user error. Everyone knows to save.

On the upside, doing the same essay again is so much easier and usually comes out way better.