Tools and features have ergonomics and affordances that suggest a certain way of using them, and desktop filling just seems to encourage people to make a massive mess. Even when I was a Windows user, desktop icons were the first thing to go. Not having quick access to a dumping ground meant that I had to go out of my way to make a mess.
As for a lack of system tray icons, the practical upshot is that my system bar isn't littered with multiple special snowflake applications, each with their own unique icon art style and mismatching proportions.
> As for a lack of system tray icons, the practical upshot is that my system bar isn't littered with multiple special snowflake applications, each with their own unique icon art style and mismatching proportions.
Plasma Desktop's System Tray widget that lets you hide icons you don't want to see. You can disable the widget, or configure it to show no icons at all.
The problem with that is, that applications will assume it is present and enabled. If it is not, they will inflict a pain on the user until it is enabled again. For example Skype.
With default being off, it is applications that have to be careful. They can use it, when they detect it is present, but cannot assume it anymore.
You can make the System Tray show no icons unless it is invoked to deal with applications that behave poorly.
System trays exist on most platforms, and apps, especially cross-platform apps, will sometimes assume that they exist. I prefer to use a system that can handle those apps.
It was a crutch when windows 95 introduced it, and it is still a crutch today.
I prefer when applications do not assume that it is available at all; if they do, they are broken. Applications, that force themselves on the user upon startup, then sit in the systray and are resisting the user that is trying to close them are outright black UI pattern.
LastPass is especially horrible at this. I have it configured _not_ to start with windows because I don't want it running in the background. Whenever I need to open it, I launch it, copy the password to the clipboard and paste it into whatever program, and click the X or hit alt-f4 to close it. Unfortunately, it does not close. It minimizes itself to the system tray, and gives me a helpful notification to let me know that my attempt to close it has failed. In order to close it, I must right click the tray icon, at which point the icon moves to hide itself in the hidden tray icons due to a bug in either LastPass or more likely in Windows itself. So now I have to click the overflow menu on the tray and right-click the icon again to close it. Finally LastPass is closed.
Now, due to another bug in Windows, the overflow menu has remained open and must be manually closed. The third bug here is when I alt-tab out of LastPass, it doesn't take me back to the most recent application; instead it dumps me on the desktop or some other program at random (why is the desktop even there in the alt-tab menu?)
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Applications abuse the systray to force themselves on the user and that is a bad thing, that should not be supported or apologized for.
I'm not against apps running in background, just that monolithic implementation with systray is the wrong approach. Android has shown a good model: background service that cannot talk to UI, but can send notifications or communicate with separate UI app. With this model, user has control over what is running in background or what started on login time by system (not app-specific!)-provided tools, like systemd user units under Linux or LaunchAgents under macOS. When the user wants something off, it will be turned off in one place, with no ors or buts or other black patterns that prevent user turning the application off.
If you're using Ubuntu then they include an extension to bring them back. In older versions of Gnome 3 there used to be a pop-out panel in the bottom left for legacy system tray icons.
