So recently I upgraded my mac mini to macOS 26 (Tahoe), and I noticed that the icons I had in the top left of my screen had been pushed over to the middle of the display.
Initially, I assumed it was just a defaults/layout reset, but when I tried to put them back they just got pushed back out the moment I let go of the icon.
This set me going down the rabbit hole of removing .DS_Store files and resetting plists ... all to no avail.
Searching online did not seem to turn up any results, so as an investigation I made a new user account on the system, logged in and what did I see in the top left ... the default widgets, couldn't be that I thought as I went to the settings to turn off widgets, but sure enough the same behavior persisted; so I turned widgets back on, removed the bottom one and turned them back off, and what do you know ... it let me put the icons in that space vacated by that widget now.
So if you come across this issue; the fix is reenable widgets in your settings, remove them and then turn off widgets again ... who knows why its like that in 26 (as it was not in any of the earlier versions), but it seems that either by bug, or by intent, that space is reserved the widgets now even if they are turned off (so the only option is to fully remove them)
