Except that's not true, is it, Phil? You're emotionally invested in Linux; specifically, you hate it. That's why you made this thread, isn't it? If you'd really been looking for help, you would have responded to the very first post with "hey, that worked great, thanks!" My work here, anyway, is done. Anyone coming to this thread can draw their own conclusions as to what happened. Me? I'm off to play trains with my daughter - you should see the Brio set we've got, it's great. She's inherited a bunch of stuff from her grandfather that her mother used to play with - including the cutest home-made Thomas and Percy trains. Just nobody tell Gullame about the copyright infringement, yeah?
It is a question of licencing. So it is EXACTLY the same issue as with exFAT. exFAT licencing is incompatible with the Linux kernel, so it cannot be included. And a user space FUSE driver is not included by default because even after all that, unless MS is getting paid the use of that FUSE driver is still questionable from legal standpoint. So while MS won't go after you Phil if you use that driver, it would send their legal team after Canonical, SUSE or Red Hat. If Canonical, SUSE or Red Hat would license exFAT, they could include the driver in base system - but again, who want to pay to MS for the filesystem which is rarely used. Same as with the DVD codec. MS doesn't want to pay for it in your basic OS licence, it's $10 taken from their profits. They can't include it without paying to the DVD Forum, and they don't want to. So they are giving you 3rd party solutions, which are either paid and licensed from DVD Forum (their own pack) or are in questionable legal status (free DVD codecs).
I know I'm a little late to the party, since it took 6 days for the mods to approve my account, but let me tell you, I signed up to tell you that you are completely wrong. You've contradicted yourself. Not only that, but there's one thing that you don't understand about the core philosophy of Linux: it's free. For everyone. Microsoft are just as bad as Apple - if those exFAT drivers were included with a distro, there would be lawsuits, in a similar fashion to Apple's lawsuits against Samsung for their "similar" devices. If you can't install 1 package without complaint, then Linux is really not the right environment for you. I use Windows myself, since I game; if you're afraid of a terminal, then Linux truly isn't for you. I mean, think about it - Linux came from Unix, a server OS built for stability, not ease of use. Linux was just 1 geek's project to port Unix from SPARC to x86. But it's become a lot more than that, and only because of its open nature and the community. That's why I get daily updates on Arch Linux. That's really not something you can say about Windows. Windows is for people who don't care about how things happen, only that they do. Windows is perfectly usable, and I use it daily, but Linux has a better philosophy. Add to this its lightweight and flexible nature (do you see Windows running on the raspberry pi?) and you get what is a much better OS IMO. Windows isn't without its faults - until recently, you have had to install additional software to do something as simple as mount an ISO file. In Linux: "mount -o loop yourdisk.iso /mnt/disk" Linux has its quirks, yes. But the benefits far outweigh the negatives for me. That simply isn't the case for you - I have time and patience, and I enjoy messing around with Linux, whereas you might simply want to use it. Anyway, it seems to me that you came here to argue that Linux sucks, and not actually ask for help.
