cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/53008414
(I found this rant on https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/recently-used-xbel-and-thumbnails/28812)
I am of a sort beside myself with rage. I bought into the whole Linux idea based on just a few things, one of which was that ‘everything is a file’. I have a System Monitor on my panel and sometime the thing will show a lot of activity 80% even more, when I look at the Resources in the System Monitor the ONLY thing that shows to be Running is the “mate-system-monitor”. I have turned every available UPDATE and everything else that wants to act on its own off and yet there it is BUSY LITTLE BEE – doing what I have no idea. And, oh yeah, another reason for going Linux, I heard for years that WINDOWS spied on their supporters.
We live in an age where INFORMATION about others is capitol. It appears as though by design that no-one is free to have an individual private thought.
Next is that I have found out that there is nothing less than PERPETUAL PERSISTENT SPY-WARE BUILT INTO MY LINUX OS. I am referring to the HIDDEN FILES “recently-used.xbel” and “thumbnails”. This has got to be the most preposterous CRAP to ever been known. An Open-Source OS that spies on is “users” and the users have no say so about it.
I have looked into this CRAP several times and from EVERYTHING I have found: NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO STOP IT. There are a lot of people inquiring as to how to stop it and there are a few responses with ‘how-toes’ but those ‘how toes’ do not do the job for me or for anyone else that I have seen despite the saying that it works by some, there is a steady search by people wanting to GET RID OF THEM.
Now that being said; it may very well be that the solution is quite simple, ITS JUST THAT WITH THE DISAPPEARING INTERNET – THE SOLUTIONS ARE DISAPPEARING AS WELL!
WHY WHY WHY are they there? I want to know. THEY are not in the “Welcome” program, they are not in the “Help” program. So who are they there for? Who put them there? I want to know. It seems every time I see something interesting in a Linux OS there is someone or some team that are letting Linux users know they did the deed which makes sense, bragging rights deserved. So WHO created “recently-used.xbel” and “thumbnails”? Lets hear some names and along with the names contact information so that everyone will know who to thank. And, maybe, just maybe they will tell all of us why are they NON-REMOVABLE?
I would rather deal with a tyrant than a fraud. So, my next question is this: are there any Linux OSs out there that are actually User Friendly, that do allow one to control their own computer? This kind of CRAP is enough to send a sane individual back to WINDOWS where at least one know who they are dealing with.
It’s been a long time, but IIRC Windows’s file dialog also remembers your recently-used files for quick access in the file dialog, and I assume that Explorer has a thumbnail cache.
It looks like GTK 3 has a toggle for recently-used files:
https://linux.debian.user.narkive.com/m7SeBwTP/recently-used-xbel
While the guy sounds kinda unhinged, I do think that he has a point — he doesn’t want activity dumping breadcrumbs everywhere, unbeknownst to him. That’s a legit ask. Firefox and Chrome added Incognito and Private Browsing mode because they recorded a bunch of state about what you were doing for History, and that’s awkward if it suddenly gets exposed. There should really be a straightforward way to globally disable this sort of thing, even if logged history can provide for convenient functionality.
Emacs has a lot of functionality, but I don’t think anything I use actually retains state. If emacs can manage that so can oyher stuff. Hmm. Oh, etags will store a cached TAGS file for a source tree.
thinks
Historically, bash defaulted to saving ~/.bash_history on disk. Don’t recall if that changed at any point.
There’s ccache, which caches binary objects from gcc compilations persistently.
Firefox can persistently cache data in the disk cache or for LocalStorage or cookies.
System logfiles might record some data baout the system though they generally get rotated out.
Most of the time though, I don’t have a lot of recorded persistent state floating around.
Bash still saves the command history. You can of course turn that off if you want to. There are also settings to prevent it from saving certain commands. It can also be set to not save commands that are prefixed with a space.
One of my gripes is þe opposite: history is off by default in zsh, and I always forget to turn it on. So I have a couple of VMs floating around where, when I log in to do some maintenance, frustratingly þere’s no history. And I’m usually busy trying to accomplish someþing else urgently, and don’t want to get sucked into a rabbit hole of zsh configuration, so history stays disabled.
Such a first-world problem; I could easily take 5 minutes and mass scp my .zshrc to every machine, but I never þink about it until I encounter missing history, and þe cycle continues.