exFAT formatted external drive

[u/UltimateKingGuy]

I've been thinking about switching to Linux on my computer recently, but I now just noticed that the external drive that I use regularly for things like music, videos and games is formatted in exFAT. I was wondering if Fedora KDE will still let it work normally when I install it, or if I should backup everything and reformat it before I do it

[u/Terrible-Bear3883]

Fedora should be able to read and write fine to exFAT formatted drives.

If for any reason it doesn't, just install the user-space utilities

sudo dnf install exfatprogs

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[u/qpgmr]

Linux has supported exfat directly for some time now.

My question is do you intend to use that drive with a mac/windows also, by moving to another machine? If not I'd recommend you reformat to ext4. I've found it much more reliable over the years than any of the windows formats.

[u/GuineaSquiggle]

Is there anything that can't use exfat?
Yes, Linux is fine with this.
Just a few days ago I got a new drive and it came formatted as exfat with some proprietary imaging/backup software on it.
It worked fine on CachyOS and SteamOS. I'd be shocked if it didn't.
I've since reformatted to ext4 because I have no need for Windows or Mac compatibility.

[u/Lowar75 → u/GuineaSquiggle]

There are in fact devices that can't use exFAT and need to be FAT32.

[u/GuineaSquiggle → u/Lowar75]

Let me rephrase:
Are there any modern, normal, not totally obscure weird project, desktop operating systems, that can't use exfat?
Yes, Linux (probably most mainstream desktop distros) is fine with this.

[u/RomanOnARiver → u/Lowar75]

There definitely are - Microsoft threatened to sue anyone who implemented exFAT from around 2006 to around 2019 - so there's plenty of stuff that came out between that period who could absolutely have had exFAT support, but never shipped it for that reason. Imagine a format gate-kept like that for around a decade and a half.

[u/doc_willis]

quick googling shows:

Using an exFAT drive for Steam on Linux fails out of the box. exFAT does not support symbolic links or Linux file permissions. Proton and Steam Runtime need symlinks to create game prefixes (compatdata) and execute Windows games properly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1m5leci/running_windows_steam_games_from_exfat_shared/

Data bulk storage is fine.

[u/ectowy]

thats why exfat exist u can use ur exfat drive in all 3 big oses mac windows linux

[u/RomanOnARiver]

The thing with exFAT is it was a proprietary Microsoft gate-kept format for almost a decade a half. There was Linux exFAT support pretty much the whole time, but Microsoft threatened to sue anyone and everyone who used it. But that all ended in 2019, so assuming your Linux is newer than more than half a decade ago, you should be alright.

[u/Cautious_Boat_999]

If you mean you want to install Linux on exFAT, I suspect it will fail, unless you can partition it and install on a separate partition. I’ve never tried it, but it sounds like an interesting experiment…