Let this guy explain to you why that is an excellent location for your Microsoft Word document, and why the seemingly random string "sjsjxmdbau278d6zhs" exists for historical and practical reasons so that your document can be referenced in the Windows Registry, which helps Windows Updates perform post-clean-ups and a complete reset of you desktop and all your settings upon the next reboot.
The entire ms office suite has become the worst for this. No I don't want to save this document into the generic documents folder of my OneDrive, or into poorly named folders that do not show any file tree whatsoever. Don't make me click 4 different places just to get back to a normal save as dialog box so I can put it in neatly organized folders like they're supposed to be.
It's part of a long term strategy from Microsoft to break users of their habits, i.e. managing your own computer the way you want to manage it, and instead get them to stop thinking and just let Microsoft tell you what goes where (hint: it's the cloud).
That's why everything in Windows seems to be less and less concerned with the actual Windows operating system and the software in it, and more concerned with Edge, web apps, and OneDrive. That's why they force the account in the OOBE, why they won't let you forget you're not using OneDrive in the File explorer.
That's why desktop/local OneNote was effectively destroyed and now it's basically just a cloud service. It's more profitable if user's shit is locked on their server instead of locally. They're slowly getting ready to do the same thing to Outlook.
Their dream, their wildest ambition for Windows is for it to be something like a kiosk you use to access 365 on the web via Edge. To get there, they'd really, really, really like you to stop thinking about anything local.
And it's extra stupid because in a corporate office setting is the one place you MOST need to avoid Onedrive. Onedrive is not useful for me ij the slightest except as a cloud backup, 90% of the documents or spreadsheets I touch have to be on a network drive in a very specific folder so that other people in the department can pull them as needed...
In case you didn't know, the OG Documents folder is still there under /users/[you]/ and you can put shit in it without OneDrive trying to get it's sticky fingers all over it. Unfortunately save as won't default to it.
Oh yes. I intentionally use that non-Onedrive documents one frequently, especially because I use onedrive trhough my school for all my school stuff but would like to keep my desktop's files separate.
Having your own hierarchy of folders works nice with pretty much anything but Office and wine-d applications. There's no problem understanding the latter, but the first one brings a lot of confusion with it's insistence to use C:\Users%username%\Documents even though you never ever opened this folder intentionally.
Been helping with multiple friends with their laptops. Windows 11 systems and the directories are all fucked up. Windows wants everything synced to Onedrive and so when you click on downloads or something it goes to onedrive's downloads and so forth. It's fucking hell I have to delete onedrive and find \documents again and try to pin it in the file explorer side panel to make it so it's useful again.
Isn't this operating system supposed to be noob friendly? If they figure out how to go back to windows 10 22h2 then they can probably find out where the directories are already.
Btw, all these computers are stock and not modified.
They want your subscription. They don't care about friendly. They make it confusing on purpose, since less knowledgeable people will just sign up for the paid plan. It's a dark pattern.
With how monolithic operating systems are and how much gets built on top of them and requires them, we really need legislation to prevent this kind of greed. There is no free market and no freedom of choice when it comes to OSes because of that dependency.
This is nearly identical to the Apple ecosystem. Everything gets virtually pathed and saved to your iCloud account unless you direct it to do otherwise. Oh, and you can't manage iOS to do otherwise, short of disabling the iCloud uploads. In Windows, for people who blindly (or intentionally) choose OneDrive for their cloud service, it's essentially transparent. I'm not saying it's right, but for the pc-as-an-appliance crowd, it's pretty smooth when it works.
Because of the enshittification of Windows and MacOS, we're already at the point where Linux is actually the easiest to use desktop OS. Winning by standing still.
It's a terrible idea. Say your pc torrents 2 TB of media, I'm not gonna pay Windows for 2 TB of onedrive storage. What of those people in engineering and comp sci who have massive files of projects and don't need to sync to onedrive because they already use backups to github or otherwise?
It got so much worse with the heavy suggesting of OneDrive and Microsoft intentionally misleading people into thinking they've successfully clicked out of using OneDrive.
Just go to "My Files", and when it opens, the first thing it shows at the top is "Recent files" and a row of icons for your recently added files.
Finding the file location is also easy. Press and hold. It'll highlight the item, and at the bottom, you'll see "More". One of those options is "Details". One of those details is "Path".
I hate this cancer so much. I've even forcefully removed it from my system, and Word still tries to save it there and then hangs for 30 secs while realizing that shit is gone.
I'm not qualified in any feasible way to talk about this...but
Maybe it has to do with how individual developers make their games. Like if every game defaults screenshots to somewhere different it is difficult for steam to properly identify and place the file?
Steam settings > In game. There's a whole screenshots section. It only saves the screenshot temporarily until you upload it to Steam unless you set it to save another copy. Extremely simple.
No, the android thing is fucked. I have no idea where Firefox saves shit to and god help me if I want one app to see files downloaded by another app. VLC isn't even allowed to see where Newpipe saves files to on my phone. Syncthing isn't even allowed to write files to the sd card. It's all stupid fucked and why I'm making sure to get a GrapheneOS or LineageOS compatible phone next.
Even worse when it’s buried in a hidden folder, and for some reason Windows keeps disabling the “view hidden folders and files” option with every single update.
I'm kind of baffled by this, because it's super easy to track down filepaths. Or you could just re-save the document using 'save as' to see the last directory.
I weep for the tech-illiterate youths.
Not if you've grown up with watered down touch screen OS's. It's hard for us to imagine because it was all laid bare for us when we were first getting used to these things.
Microsoft doesn't want you thinking about files and folders, they want you thinking about apps and services. Like Apple.
Where'd the file go?
"Why do you need to know? Just keep using the app to look at the thing you download, silly. you don't even need to do anything outside of our shitty web apps ever again."
Thank God there is that recent folder you can access in the "Home" thing, whatever that means. 9 times out of 10 it's in my Documents folder. Who the fuck wants a Documents folder? I put documents in a file structure according to where they belong. Downloads is the pit of the forgotten.
Yeah but isn't my desktop the place I want to keep things? For example, do I want the documents about my 2022 taxes kept apart from my folder on my 2022 taxes? No. I want all related files in one place. Not in my Documents.
Might not be tech illiteracy, as OP implies. Windows has just gotten "too smart" to the point where it makes even the most simple tasks unnecessarily cumbersome.
I for one have migrated to a less bloated OS which doesn't decide how I am to use my computer.