Comment 3 for bug 1838916

That's exactly how I use Caffeine. I never use the indicator because Caffeine works ideally for me, so I have no need to switch it off. (As far as I can tell, Caffeine's behaviour is identical with that of the default behaviour of macOS. That seemed to me a good model to copy.)

Ideally, in my opinion, Caffeine would be built in to the desktop environment, and there would be a desktop configuration item to switch it off if desired. Since that is not the case, a startup service is the nearest option I can find that requires no configuration code in Caffeine itself.

I also see similar session entries inserted by the GNOME desktop itself, such as "Snap user application autostart helper" and "Smart Notifier", which offer no visual feedback.

So I agree this is not an optimal UX pattern, but it seems to be a common one, and it is the best I can think of under the circumstances. In particular, I took pains to remove all configuration code from Caffeine when I took over its maintenance, precisely because one thing user interfaces do not need is spurious indicators and especially non-standard configuration elements.

It could be argued that I should leave only Caffeine Indicator user-visible, and that such use as I make of Caffeine should be available most naturally only to advanced users (who can manually add a new desktop service) or desktop environment maintainers (who can add it to their list of default services). But I think that would get rid of a lot of users unnecessarily.