I'm considering switching my computer to Fedora KDE, but my regularly used external drive is formatted as exFAT. It contains music, videos, games, and other files. Will Fedora be able to read from and write to the drive normally, or should I back everything up and reformat it before installing Linux? I may also want to keep using the drive with Windows or macOS.
3 Answers
Yes, Fedora should be able to read and write to an exFAT drive normally. If support isn’t already available on your installation, you can add the utilities with `sudo dnf install exfatprogs`.
Keep it as exFAT if you need to move the drive between Linux, Windows, and macOS. It’s a good choice for general storage such as music, videos, and backups. If the drive will only ever be used with Linux, ext4 is generally a more reliable Linux-native filesystem.
The main caveat is running Linux applications or Steam games directly from exFAT. It doesn’t provide normal Linux permissions or symbolic links, so Steam and Proton prefixes may not work correctly. General files and some games can be fine, but an ext4 partition is better for Linux game installations.
Some devices have even narrower filesystem support and may require FAT32, but that’s a compatibility issue specific to those devices rather than Fedora.