There are a number of files under ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata, like home, home-X.log, home.X, home.X, root, root.X, but they are binary data. X is a random character string.
There are 7 daemons (ps -p $(pgrep -fd, gfvsd) at this time.
gvfsd
gvfsd-fuse
gvfsd-trash So I won't have the desktop trash can without this?
gvfsd-metadata What kind of metatdata? Can I view it?
gvfsd-network
gvfsd-dnssd
gvfsd-http
Doing some searching there are suppose to be some commands to manage gvfs, like meta-get, meta-get-tree , meta-ls and meta-set, but I haven’t found them.
On a Manajaro XFCE system, are users doing anything to remove some or all, or manage gfvs? Any tips from your XFCE experience?
I am working my way through the gvfs man page.
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It is not strictly required - the system will work without - but uninstalling will remove functionality you would have preferred keeping.
Examples of such functionality is the auto mounting of removable devices and locations.
You will find the metadata in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata - and the data is referring to various devices which has been mounted in the file manager by using gvfs whether disk is partitions or network locations.
As an experiment, on a VM, I deleted the contents of ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata. There were well over a dozen files, but now only two, home and home.X.log.
I noticed it is installed on Manjaro KDE, but not on Archlinux. HHHHmmm, 
I found gvfs-info, but it says it is deprecated and use gio tool. There is a man gio. gio seems to have many subcommands.
Manjaro installs a lot of things to the ISO.
On Archlinux you would install the package separately because on Arch the user is completely in charge of the system while Manjaro distribution ISO has made some choices on behalf of the user.
Those choices are the tradeoff when you prefer a fully functional system to the install-by-hand-because-you-know-you-need approach you are using with a pure Arch installation.
Personally, i never enable “Volume Management” within Thunar (Preferences → Advanced).
I prefer to manage my partitions in fstab manually as well as manage remote shares with sshfs.
There is an old drawback related to gvfs which reduce speed to half or third for large files transfer, you can have a look on it here. It’s related to gvfs-smb only, i do not know if the same arises with nfs, for instance.
Nevertheless, i still have data in the gvfs-metadata folder, i do not know what happens underneath accurately, @stargazer, you gave me a good idea to test it like you did in a VM.
@linux-aarhus : You seem to be the right person to help me to understand one thing → I have an xfs partition on my hdd automatically mounted at start, it’s not the root and not the home partition. Do you know how (and where) it’s automatically mounted within Manjaro (there is nothing in fstab for this partition) ? Is there something related to polkit and/or manjaro rules ?
Thanks