alt Hacker News> A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons.
A lot of us = very few people in total, apparently.
There's a reason Dash to Dock and AppIndicator are packaged by default on most Gnome distros and overwhelmingly installed on those that don't have it. Even Gnome itself has started development on a native systray, although in classic Gnome NIH fashion they either want to implement a new standard or are were even considering using the deprecated snixembed standard instead of using what 99% of Linux does :+)
(Technically they want it for pretty good reasons, but good luck forcing all Linux applications to implement yet another standard, especially the commercial applications)
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The tray icon dock/panel in KDE is fully removable. You can just delete it. So the opposite of that is also a thing. No one is forcing you to always have a visual presence of a program. Even Windows let's you hide tray icons forever if you want.
> There's a reason Dash to Dock and AppIndicator are packaged by default on most Gnome distros
Back when I still had a need for it it was solely because some apps do not have proper support for missing tray icons (you can only fully close them via the tray icon), not because I actually like the feature.
I appreciate that GNOME tries to move on from this. Unfortunately it doesn't have the market control that Windows has, so not all app developers follow suit.