In the last day or two, Bazzite has started popping up a dialog box about an Unsupported Filesystem when I plug in and mount an external drive in a USB enclosure:
I know the drive is in exFAT format. It’s a drive I use for Ventoy and for backing up files (including from Windows). I want it this way. How do I get it to stop nagging me about this?
Hi,
So this was definitely a recent addition, I found the original commit for you.
It should stop bugging you after 5 times until the next reboot. And there is supposedly a hidden ujust command that will remove the nag…though I’m not sure what it is…as I have not dived that far into the commits. Hope this helps a bit. There have been some fixes added since then, so check out the rest of the closed pull requests on github to see those.
You might also try putting notifications on ‘do not disturb’ or just disable notifications for devices being added/removed to see if that works or not.
Thanks for that information. I’d actually submitted an issue on Bazzite’s Github page:
The developers confirmed that it was a feature and closed (and locked) the “bug” report:
Feature, we will not be reducing the appearance of this pop-up.
I understand the rationale for the nag (after all, Bazzite is aimed at gaming). But, for those of us using it primarily as a standard desktop OS that just happens to make gaming on Linux easy, having that nag screen pop up every time we mount NTFS/exFAT drives seems a bit excessive. I don’t mount my dual-booted Windows drive all that often, so that’s OK. But, I mount my backup drive in its USB enclosure every day. So, that irks.
It’s nice that the pop up is supposed to be disabled until the next reboot if it comes up enough. But, I shut down my system every night, so it would just re-appear the next day. Oh, well. It’s only a minor irritation.
I did take a look at the files changed with the merged change:
I’m not knowledgeable enough to figure out the hidden ujust command to disable it. But, it looks like that ujust command would run:
systemctl disable --now --user ntfs-nag.service
systemctl mask --now --user ntfs-nag.service
I’m not sure if those commands permanently disable the nag or just temporarily (until the next boot). But, I’m not even sure if I want to run the commands yet.
Anyway, thanks again for the response.
The ujust command is found here
and as you said, it just runs the systemctl commands to disable and mask it
For easy of access the ujust command is
ujust _disable-ntfs-service
Let me be clear. You mount and use at your own risk. We provide NO support for anything that has to do with usage under NTFS. Dont keep your games there Dont use you data from there. I would even recommend that if you have to mount, mount as read only.
BAZZITE DOES NOT SUPPORT NTFS
Thanks for that command.
The NTFS drive isn’t really the issue. That’s my dual-booted Windows drive. I only mount that on the rare occasions that I find that I need some bit of data I didn’t copy over to my Bazzite setup.
The bigger irritation is the exFAT drive on my external enclosure. I mount and use that daily. It’s my backup drive and it has to be cross-platform. I’m assuming Bazzite supports that. If it doesn’t, what file system should I be using for a Windows/Linux cross-platform external, removable drive?
Please read the notification carefully. Its clear from the notification that exfat IS NOT SUPPORTED same as NTFS. There is no cross platform filesystem I can recommend. if you want storage compatible with multiple OSes you should either use a NAS smb share or cloud storage.
I know you can read and write to the NTFS/exfat from linux and you can also use BTRFS from windows with winBTRFS but all those solutions have bugs. Lots of bugs. We cant and wont guaranty about the integrity of your data for that exact reasons. And this exact reason is why we have this notification. Again we try to provide a lot of support to our users. We literally cant waste time on unsupported filesystems that users use regardless of our instructions.
I understand very well how annoying this is as I myself have both Windows and Bazzite machines. For file transfer between two systems that are both on the same network and on you can use localsend for files that are on different network you can use any cloud storage or altsendme
Just use any Linux-native filesystem (such as ext4) and access it from Windows using WSL2. Microsoft even provides official instructions on how to go about this.
Although a bit tangential, it should be noted that the work is ongoing to create a better NTFS driver. Perhaps in a couple years we could see something more stable come out 
.
I get it with NTFS, but exFAT? I searched for the reasoning, and apparently it’s because “exFAT has limitations for use as gaming-drives (can’t sym-link, sustained-performance issues,++)”…
But who in their right mind would use exFAT for anything other than thumb-drives and external hard-drives? And if they have external hard-drives, who would put games on those?
I do agree.. but then, see the Linux Challenge of Linus Tech Tips and recognize that there is a guy trying to run his games from an exFAT drive and wondering why it works so bad. Well… he is probably not alone.
Anyway, having some form of control to permanently accept this message for a given drive would be nice. Like store a hidden file on that drive ‘.iknowhatido’ …
I have been plunking around on Linux since the late 90’s with SuSe and RH. I’m new here, just started using Bazzite in the last year, first on a gaming Media PC and now on my laptop. I do really enjoy the full compatibility my newer Asus Ryzen has and I appreciate all the work put in to develop and maintain this but; I wanted to interject about exFAT. One of my regular hobbies is Photography/Videography. Every single one of my Sony DSLR’s format the SDcard with exFAT. All my Video cameras format the SDcards exFAT. In fact I don’t know of a single portable electronic device outside of Apple that uses anything but FAT32 or exFAT depending on SD size. In all the other Linux Distros I have used over the years I have NEVER, EVER had a problem transferring my Videos/Photos and data off these device cards to my Linux Laptop or DT. I don’t use exFAT to backup anything! In fact I have an external NVMe SSD enclosure partitioned to ext4/encrypted where I backup my Laptop data. I have 2 NAS’s in the house where I backup my other data and even though both of them run a customized Linux, I regularly dump my Photos/Videos (from exFAT SD’s plugged directly into) the NAS’s for permanent storage. I do all my photo/Video Editing from Linux (Bazzite/Mint). I do keep my systems dual boot because there are some programs that will never be supported on Linux but the idea that I dump all my DSLR, Video Camera, Drone Video and many other portable device data booted into Windows so I can mount my NTFS (also nagging support) just to copy it to my ext4 or BTRFS Linux system drive after reboot so I can edit my Videos/Photos is a waste of time. I fully understand that if you are using an exFAT (don’t know why) to backup or store data, there may be data loss, but the concept that you are taking a huge risk just to read and copy files from these devices is silly. I’m not saying anything unreasonable here unless there is some secret agenda brewing for the thousands of Portable Electronics manufactures to start formatting their devices with ext4/BTRFS. 
One other note, Linux has always been free with no guarantee’s. In fact Windows (no versions) have ever had any guarantee of any kind, I use Linux as my only OS since the mind 2000’s because I have had much less data loss on Linux than I have had on Windows. In those few cases where I lost data it was because I 
did something STUPID!
Isn’t ExFAT supposed to be used on every OS? I have no problems using it on Aurora or Bluefin with my USB drives, so why is this a problem for Bazzite? I’m truly confused about this.
So the entire point of these notifications is both as acourtesy and a reminder that kernel level support for these filesystems is not at the same level as BTRFS or EXT4, etc…and has definite room for improvement/stability enhancement. Also because they don’t want more github issues relating to issues or edge cases arising from using these filesystems that they don’t support for gaming/etc…as Bazzite is aimed at a gaming audience. I use NTFS for usb file transfers from time to time…and it works fine for basic stuff. It is a bit slower than other filesystems I have tested though. Don’t play games on exfat or NTFS and please don’t spill Wine on them either…
.