I don’t know who these people having issues are but I run Linux Mint Debian Edition and have no issues editing my stuff.

The only issue I can imagine is if they had formatted an external HDD with ext4 and and copied docs from a previous Linux install, and now when they copy it to their new install, they don’t have permission to edit the doc.

For example, you try out Ubuntu for a few weeks/months. You format your ext HDD in ext4 and create docs in Ubuntu. You then copy those into the HDD. Or maybe you had another drive formatted with NTFS and copied docs from there onto the ext4 drive.

After a few weeks you erase Ubuntu from your machine and install Arch. Now when you try to edit a doc on the HDD or copy it to your machine, you find you don’t have permission because those permissions were set on your previous Ubuntu install.

I’ve had permission issues with that hence I format my ex HDD with exFAT and it works perfectly. Also works perfectly with Windows and macOS as they can all read/write to exFAT without permission issues.