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Much before MS did that, macOS had builtin exFAT support presumably licensed from MS, Paragon had exFAT support for android for a one time fee which works with other file manager apps(also licensed from MS), On Linux Exfat-utils enabled support for exFAT(open-source implementation).

Has there been any changes to these since MS has opened the license to exFAT?



Third-party exFAT support did exist before 2019, but vendors had to pay a licence fee to Microsoft. Apple apparently paid the fee.

Regarding Linux, exfat-utils only provided limited functionality. The kernel mainline lacked a native exFAT driver. Mounting exFAT volumes was possible only through FUSE (with all its shortcomings).


The change is that now there is an exFAT driver included in the Linux kernel.

Therefore, if you have a recent Linux kernel, you no longer need to install a user-mode driver for exFAT and the kernel driver has better performance.




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