To play a game at 1080p, I need a dedicated third-party application, because changing the resolution of the desktop is absolutely criminal and also results in blurry scaling artifacts rather than the perfect integer scaling that it should be.
Changing the resolution of the desktop indeed has hideous effects in Windows. If my external monitor loses power for half a second, all my windows get forcibly resized to fit within the limits of my laptop's built-in screen. It is inconceivable to me that someone might actually want this functionality.
And yet somehow, if I close a window, unplug the external monitor, and reopen the window, it will open in the inaccessible virtual space where the external monitor used to be, and I have to use keyboard commands to move it onto the visible screen.
I don't want either of those things to happen, but I'm prepared to believe that I have to live with one or the other. (I'd rather have the second problem than the first one.)
Why are both of them happening?
Exactly. It's one of the reasons why I mandate 4k and not 1440p, in addition to it also being a perfect 3x multiple of 720p, which is absolutely godlike for games like FTL: Faster Than Light.
The 4k monitor I'm using costed $70. It's a cheap aluminum enclosure around a laptop panel.
You have to buy it and then switch the branch to version 1.6, because the new UWP version doesn't work properly.