exfat in Solus question

brent

quick facts:
*bought a 1TB toshiba external drive for system backup and other storage. I want to format this drive exFat.
*fuse-exfat is installed on my solus

question:
*why can't I format my new external in exfat? It's absent in gnome-disks and greyed out in gparted as an option.

Reason I want exfat: do I want exfat? I want to be able to have tri-platform (linux, pc, mac) access of disk and I'm reading it's smoother than fat 32 in many ways. Fat32 is what I'm used to.
I've been reading for about an hour but would value opinions here.

New Question:
Fat32, as far as being cross-platform has always worked for me. If it ain't broke don't fix it?
edit: thanks for any feedback

JoshStrobl

Most of our exfat support was waiting for kernel enablement which only recently was sorted during 5.10, including that of fuse-exfat, however @silke was kind enough to provide a patch for exfatprogs, I just haven't had the time to work through the patch backlog (between the holidays, streams, and getting back to work) to review and land it.

My understanding is, for now, you will need to use mkfs.exfat from fuse-exfat in a similar mechanism as you would with other mkfs binaries, see here.

brent

JoshStrobl Good info, I can wait for solus inclusion. No hurry. Make desktop drag and drop icons again way before implementing that exfatstuff! 😃
---meanwhile the mkfs.exfat thread from your stackexchange link is entirely straightforward and workable in terminal. I also liked all opinions all the way to bottom of page. That is how I'm going to format it.
Appreciate the kick in the right direction, thanks.

JoshStrobl

brent Make desktop drag and drop icons again way before implementing that exfatstuff!

You can already drag & drop to the desktop. Moveable icons isn't going to happen, for both design and technical reasons.

Appreciate the kick in the right direction, thanks.

No problem.

brent

JoshStrobl
you beat me to 'solved.' mkfs commands formatted just fine after Gparted made partitions. My new external drive fully operational in Solus and being backed up now. Thanks again.