Comment 0 for bug 1810233

exFAT is, to my knowledge, the only file format supporting files greater than 4GB which can be read, written, and formatted with the standard GUI tools of both Windows and macOS. Though not a free standard, it is otherwise ideal for external storage such as USB sticks which might be used to exchange files among these different systems.

Users are somewhat likely to encounter an exFAT-formatted drive at some point, and the package is quite small. It is always frustrating to encounter a filesystem which cannot be read, and a user who has already consented to unfree software would benefit from having exFAT support pre-installed, saving their time in researching the problem, downloading, and installing the package. A user who never needs this package, but who has installed ubuntu-restricted-extras package, will almost certainly not notice or object to an extra 80kB on their system.

For these reasons, I would like to request that the exfat-fuse package be added as a recommended package by the ubuntu-restricted-extras package.