Decision to drop ext support from ChromeOS Files.app reversed due to outcry

I think it's really about Google control. They tried to remove SD cards completely and push cloud storage, but since that didn't go over so well, they'll emphasise the "problems" and their attempt at "solving" them by introducing some even more convoluted scheme for access, increasing complexity and furthering their end goal of making it harder to use external storage.

The fact is that letting apps access external storage in the form of a full filesystem means that data can flow freely between apps, just like on a regular desktop system you can create a file with one text editor and view it in another, or maybe the webbrowser if you're writing HTML, etc. You can put a negative spin on it with "apps could stomp on each other's data" or invoke the argument of "security" (which is already a solved problem: use a filesystem that supports permissions, like *nix always had), but there's no denying that it provides for seamless interoperability and sharing without any additional effort. It allows for the same level of flexibility that you would expect a general-purpose computer to have.

For example, I could plug in an SD card from a digital camera, open a file in one app to edit it, and then attach it to an email in another app, upload it to a cloud storage, etc. There's no additional "publish" or "import" steps required, only a way to choose the desired files in the filesystem to work on. Ditto for any other type of file, be it video, audio, text, etc.

Many people are now essentially carrying computers in their pockets which are orders of magnitude more powerful than desktop systems several decades ago, and yet what they can do with them is a shrinking subset of the functionality and generality those had. I think this is a massive step backwards.

Not really - ordinary users lost access to features they were using but power users still had access, albeit locked behind a terminal screen.

The only additional step on Android is you have to jump through whatever hoops was required for your device to get root, while Chromebooks have a 'get root' mechanism baked-in.

In both cases, Google's devs in certain departments aren't being pushed hard enough to put away the ping-pong paddles and stop playing foos-ball long enough to write some difficult code with a UI that has more than 3 steps. (Thanks Apple for dumbing everything down.)

On external devices however you'd probably want to "squash" the users (all files are effectively treated as owned by the one user; the user/person who inserted the external device) and also mount with noexec and nodev; don't allow the kernel to run any programs on external devices (avoid malware, hacks etc), and don't allow device files to be used on external devices (you don't want someone to put a crwxrwxrwx copy of /dev/kmem on an external device and allow someone to access it; then an unprivileged user can read all of kernel memory).

    mlabel -i <device> ::<label>

    e2label <device> <label>

I can't actually see where in the bug report it describes an issue that's specific to extfs?