DesperateSwordtail414

I have been moving data to external SSDs and flash drives for the last few weeks, and each time GNOME spawns a hidden .Trash folder in the root of the device. The folder appears even when I never delete anything on that medium. It also forces the mount to become read‑write for a user with limited permissions, which is irritating on systems where the drive is primarily used for immutable backups.

What really gets me is that the folder contains no metadata about the originating mount point, making it impossible to prune automatically without risking legitimate data. I've tried setting the X‑DG‑Trash‑Folder variable in the environment and editing udev rules, but neither solution persists across reboots. Moreover, when the drive is later mounted on a minimal X11 session without GNOME, the .Trash folder remains and silently takes up a few kilobytes – a negligible size, perhaps, but the pattern is maddening.

Has anyone found a reliable way to disable this behaviour site‑wide without breaking the normal trash functionality for local partitions? I am comfortable with a per‑user solution via dconf or a system‑wide config file if it prevents the creation of these stray directories on removable media.

Any concrete steps or references to a bug report would be appreciated. I’m not asking to kill the whole trash subsystem – just to keep it from polluting external drives that should stay pristine.