u/According_Print1614

I'm Gen Z. They had Chromebooks at every public school I went to. I've had a Gmail account since, like, 9 years old (it was school provided). I don't think anyone realized that Google was creeping into our schools in an attempt to become the industry standard using the next generation, and it worked. Google feels intuitive to my generation in a way that Office doesn't. Other word processors drive me nuts.

I used to do a lot of creative writing (journaling, poetry, short stories) on Docs, and I kept my writing there for a long time after I developed a Fuck Google attitude because nothing else felt natural. Then I heard that Google was scraping everyone's Drive files to train Gemini and that was the last straw. I moved over to LibreOffice.

The problem is that it's been months and I just cannot get used to LibreWriter. I can't figure out how to make the bullet point indentation work like I want it to, the icons are so small and the ribbon is cluttered. I switched to the Elementary theme and that helped some but not a lot. It makes me actively dislike writing. I miss how painless Google Docs felt (yes, some of that was familiarity, but also: the switch from Chrome to Mozilla was not this bad!)

Does anyone have any recommended settings that I can adjust or any videos/posts about transitioning from GSuite to LibreOffice that might be helpful?

I'm Gen Z. They had Chromebooks at every public school I went to. I've had a Gmail account since, like, 9 years old (it was school provided). I don't think anyone realized that Google was creeping into our schools in an attempt to become the industry standard using the next generation, and it worked. Google feels intuitive to my generation in a way that Office doesn't. Other word processors drive me nuts.

I used to do a lot of creative writing (journaling, poetry, short stories) on Docs, and I kept my writing there for a long time after I developed a Fuck Google attitude because nothing else felt natural. Then I heard that Google was scraping everyone's Drive files to train Gemini and that was the last straw. I moved everything to LibreOffice, stored locally on my hard drive.

The problem is that it's been months and I just cannot get used to LibreOffice. I hate working with it and it makes me actively dislike writing. I am considering switching back to Google Docs, because I can tolerate AI scraping in exchange for a painless writing process. But now I'm worried: if Google was accessing my data for AI scraping, what else could they be accessing it for? My journals make me particularly nervous, since they contain personal details about my mental health and things that toe the line of socially acceptable. But also, I'm so used the cloud that I'm really worried about something happening to my laptop and losing all of my writing.

Beyond the AI scraping, has Google Docs been implicated in any other privacy violations? Can anyone recommend another word processor that isn't evil but isn't set up like Microsoft Word?