How to get rid of Atom's Welcome screen

You have two solutions. I think the second achieves the best when you say "to get rid of":

1. By unchecking the option Show On Startup in the configuration of the Welcome plugin (Settings » Packages » welcome), Atom doesn't show the Welcome screen at startup (or when opening a new Atom window), but still loads the plugin:

2. By disabling the Welcome plugin (Settings » Packages » welcome), Atom doesn't load it (which saves memory) and so doesn't show the Welcome screen (under any circumstance):

On OS X, you go to menu Atom → Preferences → Packages and then you have to either find Welcome in the Core Packages or use the filter. You can't get there by going directly to packages in the top nav. Crazy.

It sounds pretty trivial, but after disabling the welcome guide from the welcome page,

and restarting Atom you may still see the welcome guide if you didn't close the page and have the "Restore Previous Windows On Start" (under Settings → Core) set to "yes" or "always":

Simply make sure to close the welcome guide before you restart Atom (or if you do not want to have windows restored you can also change that option to "no").

I am running Linux Mint and I deselected to "show on startup" and turned off telemetry, but for some reason was never saved and always showed. Even going through preferences did nothing for me to fix the issue. This was the only thing that fixed it for me was creating a config file for it in my home directory under the .atom directory.

cat ~/.atom/config.cson "*": core: telemetryConsent: "no" welcome: showOnStartup: false

There are other values for this file, but these should turn off the Welcome screen and Telemetry if it keeps showing up for you.

The easiest way that worked for me is when the welcome page appears, uncheck the Show welcome guide when open. For clarification Here is the image