Why is it so hard to disable all "recent files"/"recent apps"/"recent places" functionality?

I am no fan of the "recent files / recent apps / recent places" features throughout modern operating systems. In particular, I do not want/need - **jump lists**, that show recent files opened with particular applications (e.g. Okular, VLC Player, LibreOffice, ...), - a "**recent places**" tab in file explorers showing which folders I have browsed in previous sessions, or that open up at the place where I was when I last closed an explorer instance, - a "**recent files**" tab in file open / file save dialogs, showing recently accessed / saved files of *any* program in *any other* program, - "**recent apps**" feature that track, which programs I use. First and foremost these features are troublesome for me from a privacy perspective, both in a private and a professional context. But they are also in the way of my personal workflow: I know which apps and programs to use for the task at hand and which files I am going to create, open and save at which places. Any proposition of some heuristic of what I *may* want to use comes as a confusing distraction. So I figured that - on a Linux OS, as compared to e.g. Windows - it should be easy to disable these features, in my case Manjaro (with KDE Plasma), but it turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. Here is what I did (I translated many of the items from my non-English setup to English, so they may not be the exact item names as in an English setup, but should be close enough): - In the Manjaro KDE system settings under 'Workspace/Desktop Behavior/Recent Files' I switched 'Remember opened documents' from 'All applications' to 'Do not remember'. This had no effect that I noticed. - Again in the system settings, under 'Workspace/Desktop Behavior/Activities' I opened the settings for 'Standard' (my only activity profile) and switched on the setting 'Privacy: Do not record the usage of this activity'. This disabled the files and places stored under 'recentlyused:/files/' and 'recentlyused:/folders/' and along with them the 'recent files' part in the jump lists when right-clicking opened programs on the taskbar. So why is there a (presumably "global") setting in 'Workspace/Desktop Behavior/Recent Files' if I still have to deactivate it for each activity? - Anyways, this still left me with a populated list of 'recent files' in quite some 'Open file' dialogs, e.g. in VS Code. I found that these dialogs are actually some Gnome/GTK/Qt dialogs instead of the KDE file picker, and the list of recently used items is being saved in '~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel'. There are various answers on the internet on how to disable this collection. - One way is to tell the programs to use the KDE file picker instead. It seems that setting the environment variable 'GTK_USE_PORTAL=1' achieves this, although according to the original post where I found this, some GTK programs may not adhere to this setting. But even if a program does accept this setting, it only does not show the recent files collection in its dialogs anymore, but the collection in '~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel' is created nevertheless. - Ostensibly, altering gnome settings, in particular gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.privacy remember-recent-files false gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.privacy remember-app-usage false gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.privacy recent-files-max-age 0 should stop the collection, but it had no effect whatsoever for me. - Another suggestion is to set settings for the gtk backends (all individually...), i.e. in '~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini' and '~/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini' add 'gtk-recent-files-enabled=0' under [Settings]. This removed the recent files tab from the 'Open file' dialogs for me, but it did not stop the system to collect the recent files information in recently-used.xbel. - Another suggestion is to delete the file recently-used.xbel altogether and instead create a symbolic link: ln -vs /dev/null ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel. But in my case it took about a day until this link was deleted and a new recently-used.xbel file was created and started populating again. - The gnome-control-center has a setting 'File history' under 'File history and trash', which should enable/disable the collection of recently used items in recently-used.xbel, but this setting does not work for me, it still collects items in recently-used.xbel, even with the setting turned off. It does however offer a button to erase the history and leaves a recently-used.xbel with a header but without items. But with the next opened file this list gets populated again. So none of those options worked for me out of the box. What I did was empty the file 'recently-used.xbel' with gnome-control-center (see above) and then chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel to make the file immutable to avoid modification or deletion by any program without root rights. This is the only option that consistently worked for me. - Many programs have their own file history features which usually can be disabled one way or another. - In Dolphin, I removed the tabs 'Recently used files' and 'Recent places' and in the Dolphin settings set it to open up at my home folder instead of the last opened place. - In the VLC Player settings at 'Interface/Main Interfaces/Qt' I unchecked 'Save the recently played objects in the menu'. - In the LibreOffice options at 'LibreOffice/Advanced/Expert settings/org.openoffice.Office.Common' I set the value of 'History' to 0, which keeps the recent files list empty. So this is where I stand now, with most of the stuff disabled, but asking myself if I missed something. And wondering why it was so complicated, because I feel that it should not be so hard to give this whole thing one single switch or maybe a few switches but all in one place in some system settings manager. I understand that if any program with its own logic keeps track of opened files, then the system cannot really stop it, but everything else should be accessible much better than what I have encountered. And why are so many options outlined above simply not doing what they say they do? Bug? My stupidity/naivety? Sorry for the long post but I wanted to demonstrate how cumbersome this really is. __TL:DR__: Why is it so hard to disable usage tracking functionality under the guise of "recent files/recent apps/recent places"?