Unsupported Filesystem Nag on Mounting Drive

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.

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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.