LaTeX and git work really well and you can push to somewhere remote as a backup (and will usually retain the ability to pick through the ref-logs if something goes wrong). LaTeX is super super popular in the academic world and it wouldn't be surprising for a thesis to be required to be submitted in LaTeX anyway.

Github has a word-by-word visual diff thing that would be really nice since usually you don't want to consider whitespace to be semantically significant in the context of a diff, eg word wrapping.

The business world likes to fret over every detail and I get it but a lot of powerpoint presentations/etc could really be done pretty simply with a latex template, and git checkin/merging/etc is sooo nice. Let alone chapter material or stuff that needs equations/figures, a bibliography manager, table of contents, etc. Super super nice for cross referencing, kind of like a generalized form of javadocs, and it does layout pretty well with some help, and it doesn't randomly spazz out and break borders etc.

Etckeeper is really nice for change tracking for your /etc folder too... love being able to look back and see if there's been any changes that might have broken stuff, get a log of package updates etc.