Porteus

Does Porteus run/boot on exFAT? I'm currently booting it on Fat32 as per instructions, but I was wondering if it ran in exFAT faster than Fat32. I have a good computer but everything has a delay when I click it. My guess was that it had to do with the storage format... Please help with this

exFAT isn't supported for booting on UEFI systems but for BIOS systems it should work. Whether it has a faster storage format I don't know. It's main advantage is it handles files larger than 4 GB. Does your computer have USB 2 or USB 3 ports? USB 3 is faster. And are your USB posts being shared with other devices? That can slow things down a hair. Something that could impact speed is file fragmentation.

Welcome to the forums. Did you put Porteus on the main hard disk of your computer? :O Or are you running it off an USB stick?

The delay you complain about would be longer if you had to use USB v2.0 disks. I don't mind, I know it's slow, as long as it works, I could always run my favorite programs how I expect, the whole OS doesn't crash, I don't lose my data etc.

Now I don't remember how I formatted a Sandisk 64GB USB v3.0 disk to install Fedora 35. I allowed the whole disk which was just a bad idea. Now I have another one split into three parts: the ESP, one partition to boot into another penguin, and "exFAT" partition in the case being reduced each day that I would go into Windows for anything ever again.

If you're used to Windows, I don't recommend formatting an external disk with "ext4". It would require "WSL" which might be a hassle, but I don't know since I've never used it, I'm suspicious of M$'s creations. It might be a bit complicated to be able to use Porteus without hassle and without needing soon to expand storage space for settings and applications. I've decided the "savefile" is less impressive than at least two partitions of ESP and "ext4", and if I need anything in "FAT32" or "exFAT" then I copy it somewhere else.

Actually I have two 16GB disks with the "savefile" method but I'm thinking about remaking one of them like my main Porteus MATE installation. It sucks but I have also been checking out EasyOS which takes an intolerably long time to commit changes to disk before shutdown, and it encrypts everything and it never asked me if I wanted it that way. Moreover, the Porteus "savefile" utility refused to re-create larger a "savefile" already existing, from 2GB to c. 4GB which made me think further about giving up on it entirely. Yes I actually put down 4000MB instead of 4096MB, kept saying I needed to boot into "Always Fresh" while that was the mode already, and I had at least 8GB on board to play with.

I've never owned a Macintosh so I'm not able to give useful information based on my experience at that end.

I just went YOLO and formatted it to exFat. But in the end, when I had to do the install from windows, the process was not able to complete. So I gave up and reformated in fat32 on another drive and put it on usb 3.0, which is a little bit faster. I guess it will have to do for now, thanks.

try running in copy2ram mode (press TAB at the boot screen and type copy2ram)
if it's still slow, then you have some other problem.