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What's the use case? Make sure you don't introduce them as a desktop user? As a app developer? (what does the app do?) As a sysadmin with third party unknown apps?

You can't really "disable utf-8" on Linux. You can change how things are encoded when displaying or saving. (via locale/lang variables) But if the app wants to create a file named "0xE2 0x98 0x83" (binary version of course), it's still free to do that.

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I just don't want garbage file names when sharing a file system between systems that don't agree on the encoding. I was thinking maybe some mount option. I can use ISO-88591 and skip UTF-8. I haven't found a mount option for ext4 or xfs yet.

There isn't one. The names in ext4 and xfs are opaque binary with some simple limitations (like null bytes). Encodings simply don't exist at the fs layer.

You could probably write some filter using fusefs, but in practice... I think you should configure the servers / clients to agree on encoding instead. Better supported and shouldn't be that much work.

Linux filesystems are not encoding aware. Paths are just treated as opaque byte strings. However, there is ongoing work add configurable safe filenames to Linux: https://lwn.net/Articles/686789/

But it won't allow you to force ISO-8859-1 in this form. However you could filter out non-ASCII characters.

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