Word Documents Will Be Saved to the Cloud Automatically on Windows Going Forward
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Microsoft's latest move to automatically save Word documents to the cloud on Windows has sparked a heated debate about data security and user control. Commenters are sounding the alarm on the potential risks, with some pointing out that this could lead to sensitive government documents being uploaded to US-operated clouds. While some suggest that users can simply change the default settings to avoid cloud storage, others counter that this requires a level of technical competence that not everyone possesses, and that future updates could always reverse those changes. As the discussion unfolds, Linux is being touted as a potential escape route for those seeking more control over their data.
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Now that would require the competent configuration of the software by the government and proper usage by the individual. So leak guaranteed.
“Word customers who do not want their documents to be saved to the cloud by default need to become active to change the default save location.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
I think the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption of Linux is not using Linux itself, it's installing it on a computer. 99% of people don't know how to format a USB device, or how to enter the BIOS.
If it isn't a problem it's not worth fixing. A lot of people don't even know where they are saving their stuff to, so if it's in the cloud or on their device doesn't really matter to them.
Third-party doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
Thanks for the link, didn't know about that, sounds awful..
Until their computer dies, and then they get upset at Microsoft for not having some automatic backup process like they have on the other platforms their friends use.
Between those and the people that can navigate everything on Linux, there'll be mildly technical people. Those may explore things that are out of the ordinary but will be unable or unwilling to fix issues that could arise from that
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop and https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_an... w
It is if you slap Linux on your Windows computer and expect it to work. Dell etc have teams whose entire job is ensuring Windows works well on their hardware. These are systems integration teams.
If you try to put Linux on a Windows box, you've signed up to do all the system integration work yourself, without any help or support (eg documentation) from anyone.
The best Linux experience will happen on hardware that was designed to run Linux, with a system integration team to make the hardware/firmware and Os work together, with a support line you can call or write.
She then proceeded to install and test the programs she needed and everything worked basically out of the box, so now she continued to use it because it doesn't matter to her what she uses, as long as she can use it.
(She is using Fedora on a Framework laptop)
I am thinking Fedora's atomic desktop for family. Any other suggestions?
Steamrolling their users then getting rewarded with their stock going stratospheric. Excellent!
Welcome to the world of modern capitalism. I'm seriously starting to question if a company can survive on the stock market by creating a solid product and caring about the users of that product.
Bright as some of them are, it's not their silo.
[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-china-defense-d...
> Microsoft Failed to Disclose Key Details About Use of China-Based Engineers in U.S. Defense Work, Record Shows
A reasonable policy for dealing with this variety is to default to not transferring anything you're working on outside the relevant parts of your organisation - including use of cloud services - and then enable specifics on a per-client basis according to need. It's like the principle of least privilege. But if you operate that way then any software that quietly starts sharing things without explicit permission is a big problem.
And if this change will affect home users who don't have professionally managed systems as well then the same moral hazard applies. I don't think it's OK to push people into sharing their personal data online without understanding what they're doing and the potential consequences.
For now.
My wife switched this year after only ever using Windows and pure dotnet dev.
The first thing she said was "how is it so fast"
She has me for tech support though and she’s a dev which helps.
I would go with popOS or Ubuntu if the tech support isn’t an option.
People should realize everything you do in Excel and Word is being spied on by Microsoft, this cloud push is making that process easier and faster for M/S.
At the very least, go to Libreoffice. But better yet, as you just did, people need to abandon Microsoft and Apple for Linux or a BSD.
There's no meaningful difference in the desktop Linux ecosystem right now and a decade ago, you're just more open to it as the alternative got worse.
There were a bunch of issues with compatibility if you wanted to do any sort of gaming and driver support was pretty bad from what I remember. Flatpaks were barely starting to become a thing, desktop environments were very unrefined and applications like LibreOffice still had a way to go.
If you look at what's happened in the Linux ecosystem in the past decade there are in fact significant improvements and refinements thanks to the hard work of thousands of contributors making it easier and easier to use.
I've started using LibreOffice at home and I'm surprised at how snappier it is compared to Word. Exported PDFs are even lighter that the ones Word do.
Also how would backing up specifically to rtf or txt help? Just back up the original doc files.
Googling would show that any number of users run into issues with OO/LO file corruption, often from power interruption during saves. The applications seem to handle that in a suboptimal way, and maintainers are unwilling to address it. My suspicion is that their unspoken contention is that the problem is with Windows, not OO/LO.
I recommend backing up to a general file type simply because it's less likely to open in the offending application by default, if the user ever needs to access it.
it looks like the cause is a shutdown without flushing buffers so a file is not properly saved. Backups of any file type should be OK.
I use FreeBSD for my daily driver. I now stream games/Windows apps from a dedicated windows VM. It's impressive technology.
I just have my two monitors hooked up to both my iGPU and dedicated GPU, and switch inputs if I want to use my Windows VM. It means things like colour profiles and VRR work as expected too.
[0] - https://looking-glass.io/
Try Darktable or Ansel instead of Lightroom. I'm not gonna tell you Gimp is a good photoshop replacement though ;-)
Still, I'm in the same boat as many who wish they could migrate their decades' worth of photos with all their adjustments to a FOSS alternative. For me too, Lightroom is the last application that keeps me from dumping Windows for good. It already lives in a Windows VM on a Linux host these days.
[0] - https://looking-glass.io/
FWIW I use a DualSense controller connected to my Linux computers all the time without issue and without having to do anything special. In fact, Sony is the author of the DualSense driver on Linux[0]. Do you connect anything else over bluetooth? I'm wondering if your bluetooth setup might just be broken in general rather than specifically for DualSense controllers.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-HID-PlayStation-PS5
Sibling:
> there is a nuanced situation with some Realtek (RTL8671B) bluetooth firmware on Linux that is 'solved' by downgrading firmware version
Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem (how the fuck do I even start, even if I wanted to?), but still, the point stands.
You're 20 years too late for this.
The reason why Linux doesn't run well on the latest greatest hardware (and never has) is because the vendors of that hardware range from indifferent to actively hostile to Linux, and to make the system work people have to fight. Buy a legacy thinkpad, or something you've researched, and you'll have fewer problems than with Windows or Macs (which are tied to even more specific hardware and obsoleted by company whim.)
Of course, if you're on the bleeding edge of technology, everyone is using Linux (whether directly or in VMs and containers), so when I say the latest greatest, I mean the latest greatest consumer and business user stuff.
I've never understood comments like this. It's like you're looking at a pool full of people who have been swimming for years and telling you the pool is nice, and saying: "I guess it's finally ready for the real experts now."
Also, if you love vendors so much, you can have one. Buy your Linux computer from somebody who sells Linux computers, knows any problems you'll run into on that specially-selected hardware, and call them when you have a problem, just like you would do for the others.
> Of course technically speaking I shouldn't complain because I have provided nothing of value to the Linux ecosystem
This is the worst point by far. You can complain about anything that is broken, you just can't expect anyone to care (because you haven't obligated anyone to.) The problem isn't complaining, it's complaining badly. Get a vendor, whine to them.
Not all. System76, Framework, and others come to mind.
But yes, for the most part, hardware is designed for Windows and only works on Linux despite the vendor, rather than due to them.
I hope that as Valve pushes people into gaming on Linux, things will slowly change.
I love Linux and specifically NixOS but my experience with good audio and non-AMD drivers has been pretty so-so.
[1] https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ Not trying to self-plug, just documented my headache.
Or is OSX bad because you can't put it on some random laptop off Amazon?
I specifically said that I had so-so luck getting Linux working with non-AMD stuff, and regardless of who is ultimately to blame it's still something I had to deal with.
Did you buy the laptop with the intention of running Linux on it?
Did it ship with Linux preinstalled?
Did the vendor support Linux running on that computer? Like, could you call them and get them to provide you help in the case of problems?
I already had an Nvidia GPU and an eGPU case that I had bought for previous projects with AI (on Linux, but headless). I wanted to use it to play some games that are a bit too intense for the little gaming box (specifically the System Shock remake from 2023).
It's mentioned in the blog post, but getting the eGPU case and getting Nvidia stuff working with regular Gnome wasn't too bad on Linux, only took a few hours. The biggest issue was that I wanted to use the SteamOS interface and that was completely corrupted with the stable Nvidia driver. I had to move to the beta driver and it's still a little broken, but usable. The games themselves work fine.
I also had a lot of issues with audio getting increasingly scratchy as I played, to a point of being completely unusable after about an hour, and that required a lot of trial and error but eventually I was able to search my way through NixOS docs and figure it out.
The card was already two years old so I doubt I could have gotten much support from it, and I am even more skeptical that Nvidia's tech support would have known how to do anything with NixOS.
If anyone has any recommendations for how to pick desktop components that will "just work" with Linux I'd love to hear them.
Some vendors sell hardware with Linux preinstalled or specifically tested (besides the obvious ones like System76/Framework/Tuxedo, Dell provides an XPS flavor that comes with Ubuntu). You don't need to actually use the preinstalled distro, but buying such models ensures baseline support is solid and it sends a signal to vendors to continue ensuring so.
Then there's Apple's M1/M2 lineup, which provides the smoothest Linux experience you can have today (specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well!).
Other than that, the Arch wiki is typically a good resource that lists quirks of individual devices with Linux.
More seriously, it's only the motherboard and the GPU that can be problematic here in the first place, isn't it? So that's far more manageable using websearch than laptops with their gazillion components. But then again I've only built a new PC once these last 10 years, so maybe I was just very lucky with my choice.
M3 Macbook Air if it matters.
I have very real doubts that any laptop can support both Linux and Windows well.
> specific hardware features are not supported yet, the rest works extremely well
I would not describe this as "working well," let alone the "smoothest Linux experience you can have today"
Especially compared to System76, which designs their laptops for Linux, customized the firmware for Linux, and ships with Linux already installed.
For your Windows applications you can try to use winapps (windows vm behind the scenes, but tucked away from view) https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
[1] never update to the latest Fedora version, at least until a couple of months after release. If you don't want to be a beta tester. Yes sometimes they don't a good job with SELinux policies and you'll be dealing with annoying popup notifications from time to time. And yes, if you're using full disk encryption (via LUKS) you really want to enable some flags which Cloudflare engineering contributed back (but are not the defaults), otherwise stuttery desktop behaviour is possible.
Still a few minor issues though. Sleep doesn't work well with Ubuntu on a desktop PC with an Nvidia card. It frequently wakes up immediately, or the screen remains black upon wake up. And sometimes it just works. Same problem on different PCs.
Just a minor annoyance though. I love Linux. On a recent computer everything is so fast and snappy compared to Windows or even macOS.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus...
Yes the user mode side is still closed, but that was never really the issue.
Actually, look at those commits! That repository is ridiculous. It's code thrown over the wall. Nobody but NVidia will ever work on that code.
I've had this issue as well on KDE Plasma. I'm convinced it's some sort of bug within Plasma itself. If I use bluetoothctl to pair the controller, it works fine, might be worth giving that a try if you haven't.
This is a gotcha. The issue is probably that your user dont have the permissions to interact with udev devices.
See https://codeberg.org/fabiscafe/game-devices-udev
I wish people would stop bringing this up which has not been true for years. Around 40-50% of kernel level anti cheats work and are supported (in user space).
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
I too was experiencing odd/erratic pairing issues with DualSense controllers and this RTL8671B based dongle, and using the older firmware entirely fixed it. Now four controllers can be connected simultaneously without issue.
Word has defaulted to saving in OneDrive (if you turn on autosave and you're signed into an MS account) for years now, I think since the Office 2016 > Office 365 update. The only real change I see is that the document will now be given a name with the date instead of just 'Document 1'. Maybe it's a little more aggressive about turning on autosave for you? The autorecover location is still in appdata.
In my 10 years using this website daily i am yet to see a microsoft related thread and comments that is not fud, misinformation or straight lies
I as a user know more about their products than any three to four of their employees do combined.
When did Google offer an non-cloud installable app and changed it to upload to the cloud?
I bet all those cool SV people "we're better than Microsoft" aren't using Libre Office on a GNU/Linux system.
Maybe it is time for some donations?
Folks seem to not understand that Microsoft is an ad company.
Local First stalwart that has some legacy || Cloud first "new kid" but you surrender your files.
The issue is, first: they changed the deal. Change by default is bad. People need to learn this because honestly it's an important lesson. Change is inherently bad, so if you're going to change: have a stonking good reason.
Second: Now the drawbacks of the second "hip" alternative is included the same drawbacks of the first. So, now, Google Office is a strictly superior offering.
Congratulations, I guess?
Yes, more people should use libreoffice, but most people are concerned with compatibility, a sunk cost on their office skills and it's pretty bad UX.
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