

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.





I’m not an advocate of smartphone bans, but necessity is the mother of invention, and I suppose that if some kids start cobbling together packet radio solutions to talk with their friends and reach the Internet, it’ll probably be an educational experience.