Ok, I figured this would be an easy enough question, but have found surprisingly little on google and the forums about it.
I did find two related threads here.
Thread 1 mentions switching from Gnome to KDE (which I don't want to do), and
thread 2 mentions uninstalling a number of up2date-related packages or just clicking on the red exclamation and disabling it in there.
The last one is what I was hoping would work. Specifically, right-click, select configuration, then press the convenient "Remote From Panel" button. Unfortunately next time you log into Gnome it comes right back. I never want to see this damn thing again. Is uninstalling that set of packages really the only way to turn the toolbar icon off? I would kind of like to leave it installed, but I never want to see it in the toolbar. Is this possible? I would expect so, but does anyone know how to do it?