I agree GP was talking about the multi monitor scenario, but I also run into trouble with just one monitor. If I'm playing a full screen game and want to know what time it is, there's no way to focus the task bar without closing the game entirely. On Windows, hitting the start button while in a fullscreen app will give focus to the taskbar so you can glance at the time and immediately return to the game.
Yeah, I lost so many Warcraft III games on Battle.net, when I accidentally pressed that pesky button, while having a pretty decent computer with 256 MB RAM. I ended up facing a separate keyboard without the key (and some others too).
Thankfully, these days when I want to play a bit (with a computer, sigh) on my Sway setup, yeah, it doesn’t react to that button.
Saying all that, yeah, I never considered that — having your game being lost to buggy and slow Windows — a feature. I wouldn’t want that even today, having 125 times more RAM than 20 years ago.
This is now solved because games don’t default to exclusive fullscreen anymore, so the windows compositor still runs on top of the game, so popping up the start menu is instant without any weird resolution/hdr changes
