20.04 and exfat

I am having some odd issues with Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 and exfat file systems.

If I insert an exfat formatted sd card or mount an exfat partition everything works fine. But from a fresh install Gnome Disks (and KDE Partition Manager) cannot format to exfat without exfat-utils installed; once installed they both seem to work fine for formatting partitions.

However installing exfat-utils also installs exfat-fuse... and once installed all exfat partitions and cards are mounted as fuse filesystems ignoring the kernel exfat support (via mount cmd or fstab config). This seems a bit goofy, is there a way to change the order of mount options so that exfat devices use the kernel driver not the exfat-fuse one? Or to install exfat-utils without exfat-fuse?

My solution for now is to install exfat-utils just before I need to format a partition, format the partition, and then uninstall exfat-utils (and with it exfat-fuse) before mounting anything.

** edit **

So this morning to try and benchmark this I installed exfat-utils (and exfat-fuse) but now I just get an error that the partition could not be mounted... so I did "apt remove exfat-fuse" and the drive mounted while leaving exfat-utils installed!

So it seems to install exfat-utils exfat-fuse must be installed too (at least via apt), but exfat-fuse can be uninstalled and exfat-utils still work.

Solution 1:

It seems I have stumbled upon something the Arch Linux folks have already dealt with: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/exfat-utils-nofuse/

Since their solution looks to be simply removing exfat-fuse as a dependency, my solution is effectively the same. I have filed a bug report on Launchpad against the exfat-utils package so I think this can be considered closed.

So the solution is to install exfat-utils via apt:

sudo apt install exfat-utils

then remove exfat-fuse:

sudo apt remove exfat-fuse

and all should be good!