Comment by ghusto
2 days ago
Meanwhile, also in 2026, we still don't have a filesystem that works on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
NTFS is the closest you can get, and it's read-only on Mac OS.
2 days ago
Meanwhile, also in 2026, we still don't have a filesystem that works on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
NTFS is the closest you can get, and it's read-only on Mac OS.
We don't have a good filesystem that works without caveats and annoyances on NT+Darwin+Linux. Depending on your pain tolerance, FAT32, exFAT, and ZFS are all reasonable choices.
Doesn't FAT32 work on everything? I'm not saying it's a "good" filesystem but I'm pretty sure that works out of the box on Linux and macOS, and I would assume Windows as well?
FAT32 was developed by Microsoft for Windows 95, so yes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT32
ZFS.
NTFS is r/w with Paragon. Same with Ext4FS.
In the end, it is a matter of FUSE.
Either way, I don't think Amiga(OS) was known for its FS.
I do remember there being a r/o driver for Amiga FS back in Linux 2.2 (end of 90s?)
I've lost data multiple times with Paragon.
And I lost data with XFS.
Doesn't tell us anything. Which product, version.
Paragon's NTFS driver is now (after open sourced) part of the Linux kernel, and this one is rw.
(My data loss with XFS was some 20 years ago with Linux 2.4.x after a power loss. I've also had RAID5 write hole ZFS data loss a couple of years later, on FreeBSD, and that was with a BBU for the hardware raid. Ever since, I learned to disable write cache, until I've seen NVMe with PLP for cache.)
2 replies →
btrfs has a real driver at least https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs
It's what my steamdeck is formatted to so I could plop the drive into windows and rip steamapps across to shortcut a lot of downloading.
exFAT?
> we still don't have a filesystem that works on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
One of these things is not like the others.
In fact, that option supports the others as well as it can, despite stiff opposition from the other two.
Choose the "works as well as it can with everyone" option instead of the two options that try to keep their users trapped, at least, if you want to see increased interoperability.
> NTFS is the closest you can get
Disagree, exFAT has been r/w on all 3 OSes for many years now, and it also supports files >4GB.
We shipped an appliance about 15 years ago and it had a requirement that it must be able to write large video files to USB thumb drives in a format that was read/writable from all 3 OSes, we chose exFAT and never had any complaints.
exFAT or UDF?
If only exfat had symbolic links.