[mathnode]

I will raise you- desktop.ini and thumbnails.db

[tredre3]

Windows is polite enough to not write them on network shares, unlike .DS_Store.

[lazide]

Now, yes. It used to be a really irritating problem there too.

[wasabinator]

That's still a weaker hand. macOS also has the ton of ._ files. Would have been better to have folded than raised

[pasc1878]

No macOS does not.

The issue is the file system.

Apple file systems allow a file to have extended attributes or resource forks. Thus a file is not a simple stream of bytes.

When you copy a file to a file system (e.g. FAT) that does not understand these attributes macOS copies those to a ._ (I think if the file system was NTFS then you could probably convert them but I don't think anyone does)

Copying a file out of an Apple environment loses data (OK the data is metadata and usually no one cares)

[pxoe]

back in windows xp days yes, it's pretty much never a problem nowadays. for the past...almost two decades, actually - thumbnails get stored in user profile folder since vista. (though it is different for network folders and may still be a problem.) and desktop.ini files - you'd only ever encounter them in predefined system folders (like pictures, etc.) or if you manually customize a folder in its properties - customize tab (like changing folder "type" to one like those predefined folders or changing its icon, not the same as changing size/thumbnail size/columns/etc though, that's stored elsewhere too)