I've recently rebuilt an old laptop to use Fedora 24, installing the MATE desktop rather than using GNOME 3 (I really can't get to grips with it, and want my desktop to look like Windows circa 1996).
This all works really nicely, but Pluma, the default text editor in MATE, insists on showing you the most-recently used files in its file chooser. It took me ages to figure out how to fix this, so I'm posting it here now I've worked it out, for future reference.
Change the settings for the file chooser to open at the user's current working directory by running this on the command line:
dconf write /org/gtk/settings/file-chooser/startup-mode \"cwd\"
If you want to permanently disable recent files altogether, edit (or create) the file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini with this content:
[Settings] gtk-recent-files-enabled=0
