App to Access exFAT on Raspberry Pi
For some odd reasons, Raspberry Pi OS does not include exFAT support out of the box. It was the most bizarre experience I had not expected; FAT32 is definitely not going to cut it in this day and age, and most commonly used platform-agnostic file system would be exFAT. It was quite reminiscent of the Steam glitch I had previously.
There are packages available on apt to use exFAT. As far as I am aware, they are both free and open source. Running the following command will install the necessary packages:
sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfatprogs
More recent version of Raspberry Pi installations may have exFAT support built-in. But I could find conflicting accounts on the exFAT support issue. I, myself, was one of the users who had to install exFAT related packages manually. I would prefer to call it both the joy of using Linux and the dread of using Linux. The fact that I can dive in to customize my device to fit my need is an amazing experience, but at the same time I wouldn’t dare try to explain why one must ssh into a device then run a terminal command, only to use an external drive.
Speaking of supporting newer file system, my new motherboard requires FAT32 formatted drive to update the BIOS. Windows 11 doesn’t even support formatting drive to FAT32 on GUI — it must be done on Command Prompt. I think there is the question of accessibility for average users that is being left out during development of these operating systems. We can’t expect everyone to ask their problems to their tech savvy family members, especially when the core issue behind tech support lies in the fact that users simply wouldn’t ask in the first place.