(and I would kind of avoid formatting external drives in "funny" FSs as I might want to read them in some other OSs. Unfortunately this usually means FAT32)
But I do have external media as HFS to work with Time Machine
Another option is ext3. The only caveat there is the Windows ext drivers don't fully support ext3 (unless I've missed an announcement). However they do fully support ext2 and ext3 is backwards compatible so you can effective get ext3 support in Windows.
Sadly though, all the good stuff requires 3rd party libraries. It's a real pity everyone can't agree on a standard to replace FAT32. :(
Did Microsoft ever open-source the NTFS specs and drivers?
I know there was a way to write to ntfs from Linux, but it required to install ntfs driver file from Windows.
I hope there is a native ntfs support that supports writing.
That isn't true. You need to use ntfs-3g, which is a free software implementation of NTFS (that allows both reading and writing). It's been stable for 10 years. Using NTFS doesn't require anything from windows and doesn't require proprietary software.
I stated how it was in the past[1]. Anyway according to [1], it looks like ntfs-3g still uses a proprietary version of ntfs.sys
[1] http://superuser.com/questions/139452/kernel-ntfs-driver-vs-...
Also, Trisquel (an FSF-approved GNU/Linux distribtion, meaning that it doesn't have any proprietary software within 100km of the distro) has packages for ntfs-3g[2]. So it's _definitely_ entirely free software.
So again, you're wrong on this point. In addition, I strongly believe that you were never correct on this point. Maybe you confused ntfs-3g with the proprietary version that company sells?
[1]: http://www.tuxera.com/community/open-source-ntfs-3g/ [2]: http://packages.trisquel.info/search?keywords=ntfs&searchon=...
Since my main usage for external media was big files (you know, the ones with extension mov, mpg, avi, etc) using FAT32 was not a big issue (unless it was bigger than 4GB of course)
I don't know the answers to your other questions. Sorry.
Here is a Linux script to format a drive as UDF so it is usable with both Linux and Windows: https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf/blob/master/format-u...
UDF works well for thumb drives that are large enough that you might want to copy a file to the thumb drive that exceeds the max file size of a FAT filesystem.
It's actually a shame. A better file system for removable devices was a huge opportunity for an open standard.
Ideally they could have released a filesystem that was backwards (read at least) compatible. Large files could show up as multipart files when viewed as FAT32.
Every OS in the universe supports UDF now, and its the only real ubiquitous non-proprietary filesystem. I use it on all external storage that I cannot guarantee will be touching Linux machines exclusively.