Huh… Push Britain to get back to the EU and then you guys (and Australia, and New Zealand) could join on the basis of being in the Commonwealth!

Is it possible to learn this power??

A lot of stuff now happens automagically

Nothing happens automagically. You need to specifically ask Copilot to do something.

makes it harder to see the reasons and structures and language of how it is meant to work

This I also don’t fully agree with. Like I mentioned, Copilot won’t automatically place formulas everywhere - it just designs them but you need to copy-paste them into the appropriate spots.

So, yeah, you’re not writing the formulas, but it’s not like the whole thing just magically appears.

You’ll become better at spreadsheets

Great! Thing is: a day only has 24 hours and right now I need to get better at managing IT infrastructure and business processes, not spreadshets.

If you have the time to research Excel - go for it! Absolutely nobody is forcing you to use Copilot.

Some useless nonsense, like generative AI.

This is a very ignorant and prejudiced take.

AI in Excel is an amazing feature that will help TONNES of people do what they never could It can design tables and write (but not insert) advanced formulas for the user.

Sure, you could say “just be an Excel expert”, but - for example - my daily work is nowhere near Excel. Learning its advanced features would be a 100% waste of time, just to be able to prep a fancy chart every couple of years. So, instead, I can just ask Copilot to do that fancy thing for me, instead of wasting hours online, trying to figure out XLOOKUP, or some such.

Copilot can design a table, and even fill out some data, but it won’t input any formulas. It will write them for you and tell you where to put them, but you have to copy-paste them on your own.

Also, with versioning, even if it did and caused a problem, you could always just roll back to a previous version of the file. Not really an issue.

I can just imaging an AI tool going in the messing one little thing up, and it being near impossible to find the error.

It doesn’t put formulas into the cells. It will write the formula for you, but you have to put it in yourself.

Also, there’s versioning in Office, so your spreadsheet blowing up for whatever reason isn’t a problem at all - just roll back to the previous version of the file.

I bet they would have helped though

No, they wouldn’t. I’ve seen so many posts on r/techsupport and r/windows from people complaining about Search or other OS functions not working. They always claimed that they “did nothing”, only afterwards it would turn out they used some of that crap software, which broke half the OS.

laptop had a weird antivirus software preinstalled

That could’ve been the reason for A LOT of problems too.

Let me put it this way: me, my family, and my business all run essentially clean Windows + Defender. Nothing else. And by “clean” I mean: install from ISO, leave as is.

Last time I had a BSOD was three years ago which was around 6 years since the previous one.

Meanwhile, the Tuxedo OS that I’m running right now (and, generally, enjoy very much) just hung up completely when I put it to sleep and then awoke. As in: not even the cursor moved when I moved the mouse, had to hard reset the thing. Things like that just don’t happen in the Windows world these days.

Out of curiosity - were you using any “debloaters” or other scripts/apps that were supposed to “fix” or “speed up” Windows?

You seem to be confused. We’re talking about an “OS for the masses”. What you’re talking about is so far beyond the “high end for the top tier enthusiasts” that it’s not even funny.

It’s easier to use than Windows

LOL, good one!

I especially loved the user friendliness of my distro randomly disconnecting my BT mouse and refusing to reconnect. Had to edit grub to get it back to working order.

Or how I changed the lock screen image through settings. Now I can see it - in Settings. Only. Because if I lock my device, I still see the old one.

Or how on Kubuntu, my previous distro, the applications’ menu (the one with “File”, “View”, “Help”, etc.) just disappeared from all apps. Spent two days trying to sort it out and ended up switching to Tuxedo OS.

Such an easy to use OS, especially for those who’ve never done one bit of troubleshooting themselves!