Is there any point in converting the partition to ext4 in my situation? [Solved]

[TTwrs]

I never had a lick of trouble reading and writing to NTFS with MX-Linux, except for one caveat: all files and directories would mount with full Read-Write-Execute (777) permissions. Not good at all! Fortunately, a solution that works perfectly was posted by 'fehlix' here...
viewtopic.php?p=745313#p745313

[DukeComposed]

I never had a lick of trouble reading and writing to NTFS with MX-Linux, except for one caveat: all files and directories would mount with full Read-Write-Execute (777) permissions. Not good at all! Fortunately, a solution that works perfectly was posted by 'fehlix' here...
viewtopic.php?p=745313#p745313

I remember that thread and I concur. The only caveat to be aware of is that by permanently changing the file permissions on mounted drives, you can lose the ability to execute programs stored on those drives. If you're just saving data to a USB stick this isn't a problem, but if one of those files is, say, a Linux binary or shell script meant to detect bitrot on that USB stick, you may not be able to simply run it from a terminal once its permissions will have been changed. This isn't necessarily good or bad, it's just a side effect of making a udisks permissions mask edit.

[TTwrs]

Agreed, that is a side effect. It's less of an issue for me since I can still change the permissions for the occasional file or marked files in the file manager as needed. Easier that setting 500,000 files and folders to 644/755.

I think it was MX-16 that did NOT mount NTFS and exFAT as 777 like it does now. That is just inherently wrong. I could never figure what changed, or why.