define formatting ? usually a fat32 should be good enough for a classic bootstick. But in general. if you want to create a partition yes you should take a linux format like ext4 or btrfs.
Different operation-systems prefer different File-systems.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4 vs en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS vs en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs vs .....
you see every company at some point wanted something different than open source implementations offered. So they created their own proparitary system to fulfill their needs.
And that's why linux / Mac / Windows use different file systems and are optimized to use them.
But in theory at least linux can run on other file systems. I am not quite sure how it works with HFS from mac. Since they are extra picky on their patents.
askubuntu.com/questions/332315/how-to-read-and-wr…
But if you start your system up with fdisk and prepare it accordingly I think you could use it. I never tried it, hence I would not recommend it.
Does this answer your question? or at least help a little? I am not sure if I got the question right.