Open-Source Machismo

[writerkit]

So LibreOffice does not come with autosave enabled by default.

It's surprising that it took me this long to realize that, but *autorecover* comes by default (set for every half-hour, which I think is a bit long) so it hasn't really come up until I had a few crashes in ways that didn't trigger the autorecover. What I actually went looking for was whether there were backup copies somewhere, but instead I came upon a bunch of posts in various discussion places of people going "Why is this not enabled by default" and people responding, essentially, "if you can't handle saving manually go back to Windows."

It does *exist*, but you have to go like four menus deep to enable it.

There is no reason not to default to autosave being on except attitude.

Half the time I wonder if open-source people actually *want* uptake of their stuff or if they're hoping they can keep out the undesirables by making it hard to use.

Comments

[squirrelitude]

Does Microsoft Word autosave these days? I haven't used Windows in well over a decade, but I don't recall that. I think LibreOffice was just copying what Word did at the time. I'm not opposed to it, but it would definitely be a significant change in LibreOffice behavior, so they'd have to signal the transition pretty loudly.

Autorecover not being more frequent is... definitely a choice, though.

[writerkit]

I stopped using Word in grad school and it definitely had autosave set as default back then.

[jducoeur]

You're probably not entirely wrong.

Even more than that, though, I often detect a bit of resentment at the notion of having to work with UX people to make stuff better. There's a good deal of, "I'm an Engineer! I know all!", and sometimes a complete lack of humility around the reality that that's just not true, often especially around soft-skills stuff like UX.

[jducoeur]

Also, one shouldn't underestimate the problem of resources. OSS projects are often shoestring affairs, run by people as a labor of love, and they reflect what those engineers care about enough to put that effort into. Quality-of-life stuff like this often doesn't make the cut.