Why are you framing "an application with no open windows" as an idea that should be avoided? It's a useful concept, especially when dealing with heavy applicati

Why are you framing "an application with no open windows" as an idea that should be avoided? It's a useful concept, especially when dealing with heavy applications that take a while to launch (perhaps with a splash screen). It's also not how truly background services are represented to the user; only temporarily backgrounded aplications use this paradigm. Stuff that's meant to almost always be in the background with little or no UI (eg. VPNs) generally don't take space in the Dock. I think it's a lot more fair to say that other desktop environments lack an equivalent because they don't have a cohesive notion of "application" in the first place, though influence from OS X/macOS has been pushing other desktop environments in that direction (see eg. the evolution of the Windows taskbar)