The canonical example of an application that can break with 'noatime' is the "mutt" email client with mbox style single file email spools. Most modern applicat

The canonical example of an application that can break with 'noatime' is the "mutt" email client with mbox style single file email spools. Most modern applications are not designed to operate on shared files like this so in general 'noatime' is safe for 99.9% of software.