I’m pretty sure I had it in my tray in Ubuntu. The Gnome panels have multiple possible containers, one of them takes tray icons. Are you sure it’s not just hidden? For me it was in the box next to the power menu. Did you try and start other apps with tray icons to test it (like idk pidgin)?

Also maybe check if you have a systray whitelist blocking it in dconf.

The problem with Steam is that the only way to close it is to right-click the taskbar icon and exit (KDE, Windows). I assumed that I could kill steam in task manager. However, Steam immediately restarts upon being killed. (sub-processes resuscitate it I guess)

the killall terminal command gets the job done. “killall steam” is probably the solution to my problem. However it would still be nice to see what apps have “closed” to the taskbar. I can’t kill 'em if I don’t see 'em.

It’s funny because I have the same problem on Windows. The game-launch-apps love to start background processes and services. I had run each of these delinquent children down and made a batch file to merc them all in turn.