I'm considering switching my computer to Fedora KDE, but my regularly used external drive is currently formatted as exFAT. It contains music, videos, games, and other files. Will Fedora be able to read and write to it normally after installation, or should I back everything up and reformat the drive first? I may also want to use the drive with Windows or macOS in the future.
3 Answers
Bulk storage should work fine, but games installed through Steam can be more complicated on exFAT. It doesn’t provide Unix permissions or symbolic links, which some Linux game tools, Proton prefixes, and compatibility data rely on. For a Linux-only Steam library, ext4 is generally the safer option; for shared files, exFAT is fine.
Yes, Fedora should read and write to an exFAT drive normally. If support tools aren’t already installed for some reason, you can add them with `sudo dnf install exfatprogs`. There’s no need to reformat just to make the drive usable.
Keep exFAT if you need to move the drive between Linux, Windows, and macOS. It’s a good choice for general storage like music, videos, and files. If the drive will only ever be used with Linux, ext4 is usually a more reliable Linux-native filesystem, but switching means giving up easy compatibility with other operating systems.
Also, some specialized devices only support FAT32, so exFAT isn’t universally compatible with every piece of hardware.