Comment 13 for bug 58205

It presents a dialog with what appears to be a very underpopulated list of filesystem choices not based on what the system is capable of doing. The clue that it does not take immediate action but presents a dialog is that the text is "format..." not "format" (note the ellipsis).

Ideally, this functionality should Just Work for all read/write media. If I put a floppy or DVD-RAM in and it is unformatted, I should additionally get a dialog asking me if I'd like to format the device. (And in the event that the device *is* formatted, but has a filesystem that isn't understood by the local system, that can be detected and a dialog can appear that says "support for this filesystem isn't installed" or something like that.)

For read/write media, I should be able to right-click, select format, and be able to choose any filesystem that is supported for creation on my system. I should be able to format using FAT12/16/32, various versions of UDF, ext2/3/4, btrfs, and so forth. The tool should provide sanity checks as well, so that if someone is formatting a 1 GB device neither FAT12 or Minix filesystems are options, as an example. (Minix filesystems are still useful when using very old floppy disks...)

It is a nice touch that it supports formatting logical volumes. Still, it needs more love.