dotfiles live in your home directory almost exclusively.

Literally there’s no tooling I know of that will drop random hidden files.

The ext4 filesystem does have a special hidden directory for data partially recovered/corrupted

On that note, ZFS has a hidden ".zfs" directory for accessing filesystem snapshots.

That works with ZFS shared over the network (samba, etc) too, which can be useful. :)

Does Windows still make that file? I built a new PC a few years ago and don't recall disabling it (Win10).

I think it’s only present if Explorer needs to store a preview for a folder or file.

They're gone since Vista (2007), I think. Widows now stores thumbnails in the user profile folder. But the stigma lives on.

i must have missed the part of nautilus or dolphin where they put a dot file in every directory you navigate to.

I quite literally do not know a single filesystem that creates dotfiles outside of the volume root directory, besides APFS. It is both worse and unique relative to modern operating systems.