Am I right in thinking that, in the year 2024, the only file system that #Windows#MacOS#Linux#FreeBSD and #OpenBSD can all read and write on, without installing additional software is ExFAT? E.g. if I want to format a HDD to share large files with less technical relatives, that's my best choice?
@hl
At least for #FreeBSD, #ExFAT mandates to install driver, sysutils/fusefs-exfat (and maybe additionally, sysutils/exfat-utils).
They would NOT merged into base system forever, because of conflicting license, unless re-licensed under any of BSD-compatible licenses and patents granted freely.
So #FAT32 would be the choice, although its limitations about large file systems. At worse, #FAT16, as I'm not at all sure about #MacOS. #Linux would not have licensing issue, but would still have patent issue for #ExFAT.
In which I demonstrate why using #exFAT for a sample content drive is a bad idea.
Though this demo specifically references #Mac and #APFS, on #windows I highly recommend following this maxim as well, and using #NTFS for your samples.
Please avoid #exFAT for samples wherever possible.
TIL that #exFAT (which you probably use on larger sdcards, and external hard drives) was grossly inefficient at storing large numbers of "small" files!
A collection of ~900000 scans takes 950 GB on this exFat #filesystem, but only 380 GB on ext4.
The disk usage of each file gets rounded up to 1 MB. It's a 1.1 TB filesystem, so according to the wikipedia page, the cluster size should be 512 KB (which would still waste a few hundred GB). The disk came preformatted by SanDisk.