News Microsoft waves goodbye to FAT with exFAT deals

I really don't understand all the hate.

Microsoft makes something, wants to licence it out to make some "money". They're not forcing you to use it and even if they were, what difference would it make? As has already been mentioned, NTFS is proprietary we're (almost) all content with that.

Why do people act like Microsoft (et al) are anything other than businesses out to make a buck?

 

The hate comes from the fact that instead of creating a foundation where these companies(linux,apple,microsoft, openBSD et al) get together and try and create a universal standard for things like this, propriety standards are used to try and lock people in. Ultimately it just creates frustration when the end users end up with compatibility problems. Companies like Microsoft make billions in profit, instead of doing something that benefits all end users they just try and eke more out. If there were more players in the O/S scene than the big three moves like this would be a bloody nightmare.

 

THIS.

 

This is a non-issue, and we are all carrying on about nothing. exFAT will be no more an issue on Linux than FAT is now. There isn't much urgency to make a solution at the moment because no one is using exFAT yet. When people do, proper support will occur. If you NEED it now (why?) there are solutions (such FUSE or Tuxera) now.

And as to being a closed-source Microsoft file system, well so is NTFS and I bet most Linux users would format their large capacity USB drives with NTFS, if only because of the wide compatibility with systems.
Is it ideal? No, an open solution would be best, but in the absence of a favoured implementation or a influential pushing supporter, exFAT may end up being it.
The only issue you might have is the Microsoft Tax that is added to devices that support exFAT, and that has already been paid via licencing so...

 

Mac's have had NTFS *read* support for years so that should have worked. What I have sometimes found is that if you don't eject the HDD cleanly on Windows, OS X will often refuse to mount it. Running "chkdsk x: /f" from a Command Prompt usually fixes this issue.

If your HDD was formatted as exFAT you wouldn't have had this problem since OS X has supported exFAT since 10.6.5.

 

WinFS please!

Oh, wait...

 

why don't everybody just use ext4 ?

 

Oh great, back to the 1980's days of Macs and PCs not being able to share storage mediums. Mind you, most files are transferred online now, not discs.

 

Btrfs should be the future, but no, everyone keeps brewing up their own standards.

 

Everyone in the EU reading this should explain to their MEPs that this is BAD for both the PC platform in general, and the EU specifically.

I am sure that the EU will smash this one way or another, no worries.

Enjoy the show.

 

Microsoft cant really force exFat on you, but a gadget manufacturer using exFat on say an SD card could. Phones and cameras (video esp) being the prime suspects.

 

Also not sure how, they are being a bussiness, makes it all ok

 

When was the last time someone used FAT on Linux?
I use ext2 since the 90s when Linux came out, ext3 later on, and the last 5 years ext4.

There are far superior techs out there

 

Whenever someone plugged in a usb flash drive I suppose.

 

There are some free FAT/FAT32 formatting programs available if for some reason it can't be done with an OS

 

Me, last night when I had to format a USB stick as FAT32 so that I could transfer Puppy Linux Live to it in order to rescue my PC. Oh, and on the boot partition for my Raspberry Pi.

FAT32 does suck, but it's also pretty much universal when it comes to creating bootable USB drives. I've had a lot of trouble getting NTFS or EXT2/3/4 formatted USB drives to boot successfully - when I'm not using pre-built .IMG files and dd/Win32DiskImager, that is - but FAT32 usually works perfectly.

 

I tried ext4 on a USB drive once - since then I have never used it again for that purpose. The problem isn't the filesystem - that bit is fine, if not better than FAT32. You hit problems with permissions - ext4 has filesystem permissions, so if you create a file on the ext4 drive as UID 1000 (the default Ubuntu first user UID) then try to go and read it where your UID is 1001 (a second user perhaps?) the filesystem will stop you. Across multiple computers, which is usually where USB drives are used, this becomes an even greater problem. If there was a way to disable filesystem permissions for ext4 then I would be using that... Of course, if there were a filesystem, completely opensource like the ext family, that specifically lacked permissions support (along with other things that are irrelevant on a USB drive, like 'aggressive' journalling) then USB drives would finally have a place in the Linux ecosystem.

 

Ah, but the problem with chmod'ing is that you have to do that every time you write new files in, unless you have the fancy mounting options set. And for those fancy mounting options - it is not guaranteed that can be done to each computer that I may need to work with - on some of the computers I do not even have permissions to mount anything, and FUSE (or whatever the mounting backend is) does it automatically, which unfortunately doesn't have the option of changing those mount options.

Because of the inherent multiple computer problem, setting things that only affect the local computer (like mount options) are out of the question. Changing the permissions of my files every time I create a new file is a temporary solution, but the annoyance caused by forgetting to do that one time then being stuck without access to files for, say, a day, is frustrating to say the least. Until permissions can be turned off on the filesystem itself I can only stay productive while using FAT32, or exFAT once Linux FUSE modules come out.