As in this question, I found that when I set "Settings -> Dock -> Auto-hide the Dock" to "On", the dock almost completely covers the leftmost column of desktop icons:
This makes it very difficult to see or select those icons. (I can manually drag them out from under the dock, but then e.g. clicking "arrange icons by name" or changing the dock auto-hide settings moves them back under it again.)
Unlike the OP for the linked question, whose preferred solution is to hide the dock when there are no windows covering it, I would prefer the icons to default to locations that are not covered by the dock, as they do when the dock is not set to auto-hide. Is there any way to do this?