If you find Recent Files in Cinnamon menu is annoying, then disable it. Unfortunately, Cinnamon System Settings has no option for this tweak yet. So you must do that manually. I use Cinnamon 2.2.13 on Linux Mint 17. This tweak is applicable to Cinnamon in another Linux distro.

If you are using KDE, and find Recently Used section in your menu, you probably feel it is annoying. Especially for your privacy. So how to disable it? There are two methods, temporarily and permanently. I use KDE 4.10.3 (Ubuntu 12.04) here and you may use this article until KDE 5.