I am thoroughly enjoying the One UI 8.5 beta on my Galaxy S24+, but I would like to strongly request the addition of native NTFS read/write support for external USB OTG storage.
Currently, One UI requires users to format external drives to exFAT. While exFAT is great, it is incredibly frustrating for power users to connect existing, large-capacity Windows backup drives only to realize they cannot transfer files without formatting and losing all their existing data.
Since the S24 series runs on modern Linux kernels (5.15+), the highly efficient, kernel-level ntfs3 driver is already present in the system. The barrier appears to simply be configuring Android's vold daemon to actively mount NTFS partitions and assign the correct read/write permissions.
Other UI implementations, such as OxygenOS, have supported this out-of-the-box for years. Unlocking this dormant kernel capability in One UI would be a massive productivity and quality-of-life win for Samsung DeX users and enthusiasts seamlessly moving between Windows PCs and their Galaxy devices.
Thank you for your hard work on this beta and for considering this addition!
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Personally a user of NTFS3 at home on a PC running Fedora Linux, I understand the concern of a big company regarding reliability of 3rd party software, especially in this case with NTFS3.
The codebase was donated by Paragon Software as a open-source rewrite (in C) of their own paid commercial product (written in C++), with maintenance done voluntarily at best effort. The author doesn't employ this code in their own products and thus have little incentive to improve it, and since NTFS comes with so many features, yet has little adoption from free/open-source enthusiasts, the implementation of fixes has been relatively slow and stagnated at times.
The NTFS3 driver is one of the less used NTFS drivers by Linux users, way behind NTFS-3g, which is default on e. g. Ubuntu and Fedora. Users need to manually opt for NTFS3 if they wish so. It is thus less field-tested compared to other drivers.
There has been multiple reports on NTFS3 corrupting FS/user data, leading to it being blacklisted by distros like openSUSE.
There is no comprehensive solution to error check NTFS under Linux, unlike exFAT, which has exfatprogs.
With all the above risks, I would strongly discourage you to use NTFS3 to mount drives read-write, especially not large backup drives containing precious data that are not backed up elsewhere.
However, courtesy to developer Namjae Jeon, who previously upstreamed the exFAT kernel driver (accompanied by exfatprogs, also maintained by him) during his time working at Samsung, a new NTFS driver is being developed and shipping in the upcoming Linux 7.1, based on the previous read-only NTFS driver that was simpler and more tested. We could hope for a better future of NTFS on Linux in the near future, as he is now part of the Samba team, a trusted supplier of open-source software for building Microsoft-compatible solutions.
