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ghustolast Wednesday at 8:22 PM8 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

yjftsjthsd-hlast Wednesday at 8:56 PM

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.

tombertlast Thursday at 12:03 AM

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?

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Fnoordlast Wednesday at 8:49 PM

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?)

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Already__Takenlast Wednesday at 8:29 PM

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.

codepoet80last Wednesday at 8:23 PM

exFAT?

trelanelast Thursday at 12:51 AM

> 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.

ranger_dangerlast Thursday at 12:24 AM

> 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.

miffelast Wednesday at 8:41 PM

exFAT or UDF?

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