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Comment by MenhirMike | Hacker News Reader

It may be a very mundane complaint to many, but: The fact that I can't put the taskbar on the left side on the screen is reason alone to stick to Windows 10 for me. Also, the size of the taskbar.

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You are not alone. I use Win11 at work(grudgingly), but I don't at home because my workflow and muscle memory is HEAVILY influenced by at least 10 years (ever since 16:9 ratios on monitors were common) of having the taskbar on the left. It doesn't help that my (expensive in 2017) CPU that is running perfectly fine. That computer, when I retire it from daily use, will absolutely be a Linux box next, and it'll be good riddance to Microsoft control.

That is the reason I don't use W11 on laptops due to limited vertical space.

On the desktop the main issue is that main taskbar can't be put on the secondary monitor anymore. That forces start menu and all the notifications appear over my full screen apps and games.

I also absolutely hated this, you can move it to the left somewhere in the settings, can't remember how I did it. Terrible design.

You can move the start menu to the left corner of the taskbar in settings (look for "Taskbar alignment"), but you can't move the taskbar itself to another edge of the screen.

No, not the left side of the bottom, the left or right side of the screen.

Using startallback so I can move the taskbar to the left. Give it a try if your work environment allows it.

I'm willing to throw a bone to Microsoft with regards to the bottom-fixed taskbar: Many programs simply do not account for non-bottom taskbars and run very jankily when executed under such environments.

I assume they judged it was better for end user experience to make dumb assumptions always true rather than try and convince programmers to stop making dumb assumptions.

That doesn't make much sense. The applications viewport can be resized, be in a widescreen, have a rotated monitor, hide the taskbar, etc. What difference does all that make having the task bar somewhere else? What's an example?

It's been a minute since I've used Windows but... what? Why would any program care?

Some programs have fixed minimum window sizes that may fit poorly on a barely large enough monitor and they were designed with bottom task bar in mind. An unlikely case and not a reason to disable left taskbar IMO.

Hm, I've never seen a program have trouble with a left-edge taskbar. Being able to move it is really useful for wide screens and remote desktop (avoids confusion), and the benefits seem to far outweigh potential jankiness of badly written programs.

Sounds like Gnome 3.

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