Thanks for the reply. I was experimenting with different sdcards and flashdrives as will as trying different combinations of partitions and files systems and I was just about to add my findings when I saw your post. 99% of what you said matches my observations. Both exfat and NTFS have there 'X' bit set and there is nothing that can be done about it. And as you said fat32 has no X set. Strangely, it seems if you had either NTFS or exfat on a partition and format to ext4 without deleteing partition to "unallocated space", you get a permission denied when trying to copy files to drive. Deleteing the partition completely then creating an ext4 drive will fix it and all rwx will be restored. However, I need the drive to be accessable to windows so the storage partition cannot be ext4. I agree that this mismatch creates very strange results.
My current work around is keeping the storage as NTFS and compressing the files before copying to the drive. Then extracting to the ext4 drive keeps the execute bit off. Alos, if I just want to open a text file, I just right click and open in leafpad. Not a clean solution but it gets the job done.
There is one strange thing, Thunar doesn't have this problem. It can open text files from a NTFS drive by double clicking. I'm in the middle of restoring my mate image because I missed it up trying to solve this. lol. So later I'll look in Thunar to see if it has the same permissions as Caja. Also the reason I didn't simply switch to thunar is I couldn't copy a file from ext4 to NTFS - no paste option. I suspect the "w" bit is off.
PS: I am getting into linux because I want to divorce from win10. Had enough. learning to setup Ubuntu Mate on Pi4 as my backup computer and eventually plan to install Arch Manjaro on my PC.
[Update]
I re-installed Thunar to compare against Caja. Very strange results.
Caja pops up the "ask" dialog
[can't post picture, too new]
but Thunar opens the text file
Yet both have the exact same permissions.
caja
[can't post picture, too new]
Thunar
[can't post picture, too new]
Furthermore, I cannot copy -> paste between ext4 and NTFS either way but I can drag and drop both ways When a text file is dragged from ext4 to NTFS, the "X" bit is set but the file still opens in thunar by double clicking and any file dragged from NTFS to ext4 will have it's "X" bit set. Weird and a pain in the butt.
My conclusion is regardless of how the permission bits are set, it's really up to the program to adhere to the permissions(at least for x), it would be really scary if programs could ignore the r and w bits too. I wonder if anyone knows why these two file browsers can behave so differently?