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Only Linux Plays Filesystem Roulette (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by madthumbs@lemmy.world to c/linuxsucks@lemmy.world

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What Linux did with NTFS (a janky, reverse‑engineered driver for a proprietary filesystem) is unique to Linux.

😈 BSDs supporting Linux filesystems

FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all support some Linux filesystems, but only the safe, well‑documented, and non‑proprietary ones.

ext2/ext3 (read/write)
ext4 (usually read‑only, limited)
FAT/exFAT
ISO9660/UDF
ZFS (shared with Linux via OpenZFS)

They don't support:

Btrfs
XFS (write support is basically nonexistent)
F2FS
Bcachefs
(Anything experimental)

BSD developers won't repeat Linux’s NTFS mistake of supporting a filesystem without full specs or stable kernel APIs. They only adopt filesystems that are fully documented, stable and not tied to Linux kernel churn.

🍎 macOS supporting other OS filesystems

MacOS supports:

FAT/exFAT (read/write)
NTFS (read‑only)
ext4 (via third‑party drivers only)
ZFS (third‑party only; Apple abandoned it)

Apple will not ship write support for:

NTFS
ext4
Btrfs
XFS

Apple refuses to take on the liability of writing to foreign filesystems. They don’t want to be blamed for corruption caused by undocumented formats, kernel instability, or third‑party metadata semantics.

🪟 Windows supporting other OS filesystems

Windows is even more conservative than macOS.

Windows supports:

FAT/exFAT (native)
NTFS (native)
ReFS (native)
ext2/ext3/ext4 (third‑party drivers only)
ZFS (third‑party only)

🐧 Linux supporting other OS filesystems

Linux is the only OS that aggressively supports foreign filesystems.

NTFS
exFAT
HFS/HFS+
ISO9660/UDF
FAT
ZFS (out‑of‑tree)
ReiserFS
Minix
Amiga FS
HPFS
UFS
JFS
F2FS
Btrfs
XFS
Bcachefs
dozens more

Linux culture encourages experimentation, reverse engineering, volunteer supplied garbage drivers, and distros exposing experimental features. This is why Linux ended up with janky NTFS, HFS, UFS drivers, etc.

NTFS on Linux was a disaster that took 20 years to sort out, and no other OS would subject its users to anything like it.

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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026

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